Poetry – Page 4 – Mascara Literary Review

Lisa Shirley

Written by mascara on August 26, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Lisa Shirley has a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been published in several places, included Sidewalks, The Carleton Miscellany and The Interlochen Review. She is sansei (third generation Japanese American) — her mother’s family came from Kyushu in the early 1900s. She currently lives just outside New York City and works as a librarian to support her poetry habit.

Reunion Blues

There is something boring about me.
I mean, I have no idea how to get a gun and I have never
bought crack – is there a brochure I can pick up?
People on the street never approach me if their business is the least unseemly,
but my friends come back from a walk in the park
with flyers for “Big Daddy’s Piercing Parlor – bifurcation a specialty.”

I’m good with directions though,
I know how to drive from Minneapolis to Albuquerque without getting lost:
take 35W south to Texas, turn right.

Maybe this is just mid-life kicking –
I am 38 . . . but I don’t smoke.

So I’m 38,
never married, no kids,
don’t have a job or a PhD.,
don’t have Siamese cats and live in the Berkeley Hills with a lover.

No money for a Porsche, even at 38,
so I’ll have to be satisfied with my first leather coat,
black and buttery smooth with a scent so delicate
it catches me only when I move.
Satisfied with the red hair dyed
to make me look like the woman I never was,
but someone passing might think, just perhaps, that I am.

After Chemo

for my mother, Hana Sonoda

She wears her skin lightly,
just covering the brightness of her bones.
As she walks towards the altar,
her skull gleams through a halo of hair
like the relics encased in candlelight.

Alabaster Wednesday – ashes
lowered onto her forehead shining with sweat.

Later, awake while the moon sleeps,
she lies coiled in the heavy night,
she traces the swell,
the rise under her skin, still growing.

And she dreams
her fingernails longer,

sharper – she has the strength
to reach in and tear it all out.

This Lent she will give up everything.

An Almost Perfect Day

My mother lies still on the sofa – not really
a sofa, a futon on a wooden frame that folds
into a bed. My mother lies still on the futon. From Kyushu,
she brought these padded cotton mats, the covers spread
with peonies. My mother lies so still
on the futon. The Japanese don’t have a real “F”,
more “H” mixed with “F” – “Huhfah” – “futon:”
(my mother lies still) difficult to say –
a futile huff. And I’m waiting
for my sisters. I called Susan. No,
Laura, my real sister, biological sister.
Laura will pick up Susan. If they each drove alone,
they’d be here so much
sooner. My mother unmoving
and unmovable behind me
while the sky begins
to lighten. It’s clear, I can tell, even without
a lot of sun, even though the moon
has gone down. The sky is clear
and I think it will be . . . – my mother –
the first time in two weeks – clear,
no snow, warm
for December, – the futon –
an almost perfect day:
– mother – a day for winter coats left
unzipped, a day for thin
gloves, a day for scarves draped
just for the look, a day
for anything.

Fall

I hate fall. It has nothing to do with changing leaves,
the wind sharpening from the North, or the short days or the coming snow.

No, I hate fall because three years ago, from September on,
I watched my mother die – I saw her skin loosen and her body shrink
until she was no longer my fat, round-faced mother,
until she was no longer my fat mother watching TV while we eat dill pickles, pepperoni and
       barely-cooked steaks smothered in garlic salt,
until she became shaky and frail, slapping her legs when they wouldn’t carry her, saying,
      “Stupid, stupid!” as if her body were a child to be shamed into working,
until she became like a chick, eating the painkillers and the vitamins, the shark cartilage and
      the papaya enzymes I held out to her.

I hated all of this: I hated being alone and not knowing what to do,
and I hated that whatever I did, she continued dying,
and I hated her because she continued dying,
and I hate myself because I think she finally chose death when she saw her dying was too hard
       on me,
and I hate myself because I wish she had died earlier, before I quit my job and moved home,
and I hate her because she smoked and maybe brought this on us both,
and I hate that it was me – that I couldn’t disappear and let my sisters, or my brother, take over,
and I hate myself because I wish that she had just continued growing thinner and thinner, never
      quite reaching the vanishing point, that the pain continued in her forever because, in the
      end, her dying wasn’t too hard on me,
and I hate her because she couldn’t continue dying.

And this is why I hate fall
because every day I remember the last night –
sitting in the dark – 4 am – waiting for the paramedics –
listening to her breathing and every day I remember
that I never thought to cover her bare feet –
even after she said, “I’m cold. I’m so cold.”

David Herd

Written by mascara on May 27, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

David Herd is a poet, critic and teacher. His forthcoming collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet, 2012) and Outwith (Bookthug, 2012). He is the author of two critical works, John Ashbery and American Poetry and Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature, and his essays and reviews have been widely published in journals, magazines and newspapers. Recent writings on poetry and politics have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, where he directs the Centre for Modern Poetry.

3 poems becoming elegy

This back pocket’s for keepsake,
An invitation to an exhibition,
Items to remember and maybe one day use.
Or discard,
Structures pass,
All structures pass,
The clear cut of an October morning carries a heavy moon.

Which we’ll see again
Notwithstanding all the indicators.
It is ultimately elegy underwrites the poem.
Shatters it.
Structures pass.
Assemblies of people.
The poem choosing bashfully
Here among.

And as the dream of every cell
is to become two cells,
so what the poem hankers after
is another poem,
splitting itself off,
feeding on the residue,
among stones,
among structures untouched

where the elegy lies
where the poem handles circumstance
caught among the fibres of the old guy’s clothes,
the hats,
he wore great hats,
the thought is difficult,
cell by cell,
October among.

Lately it has become apparent
that the nation is deserving elegy.

There are practices among us
we are tending to forget.

For which the elegy works because the poem is here among
modeling its behaviour on things which pass.

Codes, counteractions,
The poem has its lists.

The disorientation of the citizen
detained without charge.

Not, actually,
Understanding where he is.

Vulnerable, isolate.
Things pass.

You among

When the plums were first ready
before the first one fell
when the roses were not yet planted
and the ground was dry,

before the eucalyptus was cut down
bent double beside the gate
before the sea surged
before the value in the market dropped,

as the mallow came through
not for the first time
beside the road helped
by a brief warming,

as copies proliferated
as the clematis bloomed
as people arrived
to complete a hazardous crossing,

as the errors accumulated
before the apples ripened,
before the news broke, before the panic
before the denial stopped,

in dense populations
among prosperous economies
when the plums were first ready
but before the first one fell

before the goldfinches had gone,
before the nets were dry
before the crisis was with us
before a big old moon

as you walked from the table
to the kitchen door
we were glad that night
to have you among us.

Ecology

Along the broken road
nearby the disparate houses
where summers, coming into purple
the mallow blooms,
scattered,
carting children,
complex tools and fishing nets,
women,
‘environment acting’,
stop and exchange;
beneath wires where
afternoons
goldfinches gather,
‘Adoration of the Child and the Young St. John’,
nearby the outbuildings,
a variant,
slipped open early,
‘based on conflict’,
as morning comes;
where seagulls stand allover into language,
where mallows bloom purple along the broken road,
scattered, disparate,
‘beautifully economical’,
you stood one time
struggling
to arrive at terms.

Ecology (out set)

What stands discrete

scattered against the outbuildings

mallow goldfinch complex terms

and you, stood there

not knowing if you’re coming or going

‘beautifully economical’

‘hostile world’

One by one

The poem splits,
It has no desire to become a nation,
It traffics in meanings, roots among stones,
Mallow,
People,
The things they have with them,
Corrugated outbuildings
Along the broken road.

Immigrant through the streets
It craves sources of stability,
Processes it might settle its elegy among;
It splits,
To begin again,
It seeks the moon broken across the estuary,
People arriving,
One by one.

MTC Cronin

Written by mascara on May 27, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

MTC Cronin has written numerous collections of poetry (including several co-written with fellow-Australian poet, Peter Boyle) and a number of volumes of avant-garde cross-genre micro-essays. She currently lives, with her partner and three young daughters, on an organic farm (specializing in fresh Spanish produce) in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, Australia.

The Sky According to Laws

after Nikola Madzirov

The sky according to laws passed for the protection
of those who are murdered, says nothing.

In this silence the sky invites the stones
to unpile themselves and the birds
to swallow their songs.

The sky doesn’t watch and the sky never listens.

There is no news.

That the world is bigger than the earth is not news.

That the little stream could cause a king
to create an army is not news.

That lovers at dawn are monkeys and frogs
at dusk, is not news.

The sky has no sense of them and is their entreaty.

The sky according to laws in force to discipline
the carefree, unhomes anything with a soul.

For this purpose, the sky is unified.

Christopher Pollnitz

Written by mascara on May 27, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Born in Adelaide, Christopher Pollnitz lectured for over thirty years at the University of Newcastle. He remains a conjoint lecturer of that University and over many years has spent many months in Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham. He has written articles on the Australian verse novel and a range of Australian poets, including Judith Wright, Peter Porter, Les Murray, Alan Wearne and John Scott. In the 1980s Paul Kavanagh and he ran the Mattara Poetry Prize, since re-established as the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and edited the annual anthologies. Picaro Press has brought out a Wagtail pamphlet of his own poems, Little Eagle (2010). He is the editor of D. H. Lawrence’s Poems for Cambridge University Press’s critical edition of Lawrence’s Works. The first two volumes of the Poems, including all the verse Lawrence collected or planned to publish, will appear later in 2012. Examining the original manuscripts of Lawrence’s verse has involved considerable travel in the USA, including a visit to the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, which (as reported in the “Idylls”) holds just one Lawrence manuscript poem. Only in recent years has he ventured outside the libraries and private collections of North America to see and reflect on some other aspects of the continent.

from American Idylls

i. Mt Vernon

She-eagle, bald eagle, swooping up from the river
with a beakful of Potomac shad for the nestlings
—yes, let us lengthen the metre to national epic—
she settles on that Virginia pine bough, settles
the young in a stick halo down to their dinner
above the jetty where, one week of the eighteenth-
century year, Washington sent out his servants
(i.e. his slaves) to catch herring and shad for the winter.

She is the Potomac’s one true farmer.
Mt Vernon is a doll’s house on an Enlightened
gentleman’s toy farm, a former general
but bewigged and toothless now, not exactly a raptor.
In the reconstructed slab walls of the pioneer cabin
down the herb-and-market garden, they have a wise woman
who spins a deft spindle and stories for the tourists—
the best on Johanna, the estate’s washerwoman
who laundered every week every smock of homespun
and ruffled shirt, and every spring the curling
heavy fleeces. Imagine her cracked and soda-hardened
hands pressing deep into the lanolin water,
spongy, emollient. That the oil never showed in
estate accounts shows Johanna had a sideline.

Down from the family vault with its marble eagle
spread stately across the whitened sarcophagus
is a knoll where they might have been, the unmarked grave-sites
of the unnamed families of slaves (i.e. the workers).
Did Georgie-Porgie speak with Johanna?—Martha
had to ask permission before entering the study
of the Republic’s father, never biological
yet something, something maculate, was transmitted.

ii. New Jersey

We are in the country of the yellow school bus
rushing through it on the morning express to Newark
and on into New York, while the clapboard houses
turn their backs away from us and turn their porches
towards the trim white churches with those little
steeples like sharpened pencils. The young father
across the aisle sitting sideways barely seems to notice
his daughter for the crossword or Sudoku
balanced on one of his knees, but when his daughter
rests her tight-curled head on the other,
he gently strokes it—not idly, with assurance.
Having listened to much talk that is more rhythm
or dance of self-assertion, self-obeisance,
I like him for his silence, this young father,
his working pencil, and absent hand still stroking.
Now that he’s not required for cotton-picking,
and buses and brief spires seem to have lost their
centring function, Amtrak passing by them,
perhaps his hands have power to drive the dibble
into this lakeland, estuarine country
setting the sharp American grain anew.

iii. The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum

Starting from Brooklyn, where New York’s most suicidal
cyclists come home from days that haven’t killed them
we take the inevitable subway to Manhattan,
across the river the sun coming down on Liberty
visible a few seconds above the roofs of factories
in working Brooklyn. It’s a beautiful idea,
Liberty, from a distance. Before the dereliction
of factories springs up to fill the vista
there is Ellis Island that once filled the factories
with workers (i.e. slaves). Our tour-guide on the Island
history teacher Marcus Smith, had saved to send his
grandfather Schmidt on a visit back to Austria:
What I should go back to that shithole for? he queried.
But shitholes are the closeups of our memory.

Connoisseur-collector-eccentric Pierpont Morgan
is wearing his fez tonight in the Library
and adjusting his hooded lamp above Melancholy,
his refinement tracing every curve of the burin
in a luxury of sorrow. On the plains somewhere out in Iowa
under the rail a coolie’s set cross-wise a sleeper
and taking the sledge has driven a spike home, half-cognisant
it is himself he is crucifying. Meanwhile Morgan
has laid the Dürer aside and turned his attention
to the thimble of an Assyrian seal—two monsters
in their internecine embrace constructing a pattern.
Does he reflect what empires need in the building?
Does he think of the coolie? No, his focus
is elsewhere as he repositions the lampshade.

In the Museum the summer exhibition
on Romantic Gardens includes everything Morgan collected,
from engravings of Antoinette’s dairy fantasy
to Pope’s Twickenham and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”:
let everyone into the Garden, you inherit Bedlam.—
As you leave, out of certain gratings in the pavement
comes a rumble and whisper as of Morlocks feeding.
Marcus Smith, I need your help and my experience
having once worked an hour in that Library (closed this summer)
and trained a Morgan light on my chosen manuscript:
let me know the conditions of my scholarship and labour.

iv. Ground Zero

From the wide-screen windows of the World Finance Center
squashed into two dimensions like a Jackson Pollock,
diagonals of yellow cranes order what the mind’s eye
conjures as no more than a writhe of metals.
You don’t get it, do you? you point out. And truly
I fathom nothing of this notch in the scrapers’ skyline
about the morning or the weeks that followed.
Having seen a good Hamlet at the Folger
we know the Tudors’ stereoscopic vision
of the fall of greatness, still feel the medieval
Schadenfreude; but listening at another window
to a New Jersey fireman who came in after
work on 9/11 to join the rescue
(or mortuary) operation reconfigures
the Day as the tragic heroism of the Many.
Talking to a tour who’ve gathered round him,
mid-statistic in what doubles as self-therapy,
the veteran breaks off, struggling to re-enter
the horror he knew. The volunteers were his heroes;
it was their work dead and living firemen were doing.
Descending we find the Memorial Museum
adds the dimension of grief: we are chosen
(is it my face—all struggle, no comprehension?)
to be led by an ex-fireman and fireman’s father
past ceiling-high blow-ups of a Bosch Thebaïd
to a collage of little snaps from family albums
where he points out his smiling son and grandkids.
He was lucky; his son was among the found bodies.
Irresistible the catharsis that wells up out of
sources this deep, but something in me now refuses
to get it. Have the deeds that call up pity
and terror themselves been tangled in atrocity
poisoning the well-springs of our deepest feelings?
Or no—is it not that the katabatic pulsations
which wrecked the Towers are still radiating
out and out, both disuniting peoples
and shaking foundations of many a place of worship
till the Jefferson Memorial itself trembles?

v. The Whitman Way

We’d been told to see the Korean War Memorial
and having seen will truly never forget it:
in this capital of the war against terrorism
patrols a platoon that wears every face of terror,
half of the boys scared shitless, half to numbness.
But really I prefer the Lincoln mausoleum:
we pace about him in an amphitheatre
and here he smiles like a benign grandfather,
then another step and you see the glint of vision
in the stern eye required for nation-building.
Who knows what must be given and what taken
wears the stern mask of the whole tragic drama;
he knows what he has to do and he is a-doing,
he knows what must be done and the boys are dying.

We have walked The Whitman Way too, up on F Street.
It passes by the National Portrait Gallery,
the Patent Office once, where Whitman worked and
spent evenings visiting hospital camps for the wounded
that grew in the autumn rain on Washington’s fringes
though I wonder where. He was a good visitor, Whitman,
wrote letters for the boys, sat with them while they were dying
and poured out gallons of sympathy in “Drum-Taps.”
Surgeons would hone a scalpel on their boot-soles
to speed an amputation, and the nation’s poet
dared mention the smell of wet gangrene under canvas
(‘With soothing hand I pacify the wounded’)
but didn’t go on, lest it read like criticism;
for the surgeons did what they must and they were a-carving
and Whitman, he was a seer yet unforeseeing.
We have even trudged up through the democratic
ranks of the dead at Arlington Cemetery
past the bold surnames of forgotten generals
and the smaller stones of ORs named and mourned for.
At the Kennedies’ shrine near the summit the eternal
almost invisible flame you know is there burning
flickers up to blueness, and a black helicopter
beats up from the Pentagon like a heart fibrillating.
The times are the times and the presidents are a-changing
but they know what they have to do and they are a-doing,
they know what must be done and the boys are dying.

vi. Takoma, DC

Sunday morning, the Farmers’ Market busy,
young families adrift in the Main Street sunshine;
the Baptists with somewhere to go to, the Adventists
emphatically not going there, and the remainder
like me, not going anywhere, just being.
Except for Sharyn, that is, who’s opened this morning,
my daughter’s made my appointment, we’ve made friends talking
as she cuts my hair, about daughters who look after us,
how mine is a Thursday’s child, hers a travel agent
but the one time Sharyn has flown, on a tour to Las Vegas
her daughter asked, Why’re you going all that way for?
No, she’s no traveller, enjoys a long week at the salon
doesn’t mind trimming beards, and still sees her first client.
Waiting in the sun for my daughter to collect me
I spot a poster from the Spring Poetry Festival,
Atwood’s “Habitation.” A passerby stops to read it,
asks her husband’s opinion and interprets his silence,
I didn’t think much of it either. The morning’s sour note;
neither’s emerged from the Ice Age or the forest.
Here comes a hand-holding father whose daughter totters
under the Emperor of Icecream she’s clutching
in the other hand: Eat it quick, if you want to have it.
But he kneels, re-sculpts it for her and restores it.
I’m on her side; I want the morning’s sweetness
to go on and on. And here comes my daughter
bearing bags with the week’s provisions. We share them
and there’s one left to do some farewell shopping.
She chooses walking-shoes for her move to Texas,
I a T-shirt with a print of D.C.’s counties
—top of them all this leafy, sunny suburb.
I want Takoma on the map of my hereafters.

Laksmi Pamuntjak

Written by mascara on May 19, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Laksmi Pamuntjak, writer and poet, was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. Author of two collections of poetry, Ellipsis (2005, one of The Herald UK’s Books of the Year) and The Anagram (2007), a treatise on violence and the Iliad entitled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven and Two Women) (2006), short stories in The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art (2006) and four editions of the award-winning Jakarta Good Food Guide, she translated and edited Goenawan Mohamad’s Selected Poems and On God and Other Unfinished Things and wrote the preface to Not a Muse: International Anthology of Women’s Poetry (2008).

She publishes articles on politics, film, food, classical music and literature, and has participated in numerous international literary events and festivals including National Poetry Festival (Australia), Wordfest Festival (Canada), Struga International Poetry Festival (Macedonia), The Asia-Pacific International Writers’ Festival (Delhi, India) and Winternachten Festival (The Netherlands). Her poems and short stories have been published in numerous international journals, among others Poetry International (Holland), HEAT (Australia), Biblio (India), Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong), Takahe (New Zealand), Drunken Boat (New York) and PEN America (New York). Co-founder of Aksara bookstore, she owns Pena Klasik publishing house and produces art performances for Komunitas Utan Kayu. In 2009, she was appointed jury member of the Prince Claus Awards based in Amsterdam. Her first novel, The Blue Widow, will be published next year. She now writes for The Jakarta Globe.

Light Matters

All he ever talks about is the light.
In giving me a book about a writer’s
retreat to the homes of Capadoccian
monks, I suppose he also expects me
to think about the light that shines on
certain stones on certain mornings.
Sure, I say, but the colour of white
is the night. It is not the sun that guides
you to white. It is moonlight on stone.
He considers this, then suggests that
I should pay more attention to Anatolian
mornings, for there is a tintinnabuli to
such brightenings, hazel and silver
birches edging forward,
water fowls moving stepwise.
When said writer dies not a month
since he gives me the book,
he quietly goes to pieces.
Then he sits down to an obituary
of the sort that would make the dead
writer and Narcissus himself blush.
While he weeps in his own Virgilian hell,
I keep coming back to the railway of light
that fell across my chest that afternoon;
each time his eyes rested on the two bells on
each end, those soft and yielding summits,
I wonder whether he was actually savouring
the peach pill-boxes of a building in the 6th,
the one that gave the Flatiron its shape
and charge. Or whether he was tonguing
in his mind’s eye the milky ovals next to the
Rapunzel tower. I wonder when he looked at me
whether it was my light that he saw,
or the light around me,
the one that had nothing to do with me.

Postscript 2: The Surrender of May Bartram

The matter is quite simple, John:
It’s just that whenever I see you,
something in me collapses, and I
prefer your reading between the lines.
And even when you hold me, knowing
something deep about what I need,
I still prefer what is inferred.

There is nothing new in this, of course;
Cyrano is a living testimony.
He and Roxane moon about eternity
but what they really desire is desire.
In this I am Cyrano.
But this is the real me, and
this is how I feel for you.

And to protect this feeling I collapse into
myself, and a little into something outside
of myself, so that you may find something
sweet and a little mysterious in the
searching, in the idea that there is
beauty in the out-of-scale. Something
sweet that is still somewhat me.

And even though I will never tell you this,
and even if my calves will strain and burn
through the silky black, I fully intend to
wear a garter belt when you are not around.
It’s just that I want to stay true to the gaze
that gives you wings, because May is so
long and so faraway and it’s not even me.

Krishna to Arjuna: On Bhisma’s Final Day

The other day I saw a man straggling across a plain; not once did he raise his eyes. He was walking as though in the gathering thunderstorm, under the sky turning mottled green, through the cracks in the undergrowth, he would find the tiny light in his mother’s womb.

A bird nosedived into a hole in the darkened earth, whose home whose hell I couldn’t tell, but there was something about the man that was deeply touched, as though through that one gesture a lifetime of trust had been reassembled, and he let the tip of the arrow drive itself in.

Jessie Tu

Written by mascara on May 19, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

A music teacher currently calling Bondi home, Jessie Tu was born to Taiwanese mother and Chinese father. At the age of five, she immigrated to Australia- Melbourne, and then relocating to Sydney. She studied music at university having played the violin from the age of nine. She now teaches full time at the Rose Bay independent girls school Kambala and enjoys writing as a means of connecting with her community. Her poetry deals with her identity growing up as an immigrant and the comic trails and tribulations of being a ‘banana’ (white on the inside, yellow on the outside) and the shift from childhood to adulthood. She has recently received a 6 month residency as a Café Poet (a program funded by the government assisted Australian Poetry Organization) at her favourite café in Sydney – WellCo Café in Glebe. She has had her writing published in Peril Magazine and VibeWire. In December 2011, she participated in a National Young Playwrights’ Studio workshop where a selected few young Australians from across the nation came together with industry leaders to write, learn and create new works.

My mother’s heart is a small, good thing

My mother’s heart is a small, good thing.
It is lovely and unassuming like my stain glassed mosaic lamp
illuminating a room as an angel lights the sky.
It is calm like the winds on a gentle Sunday at 3.
It hums quietly to itself when no one is listening.
It never stirs at the absence of peace.
My mother’s heart is a small, good thing.
It sings at the sight of a neighbour’s garden
transforms her willowy features to delicate soft expressions.
Her heart is a keen student.
It swallows with the force of a sea cave, it
kills all light
Her horrendous freedom, uncaged-
Her fear is mightier than might
She hums to her own tuneful language,
Her solid stare, unpardonable-
She leaks through me like a bleeding creature
Her agility fails tonight,
And I have nothing but my intermediate embrace
To comfort and progress.

House

These walls tremor with their private language-
carves a sound sculpture of a musical elegy,
a requiem for my sleepless soul.

Unafraid,
I bring myself to this curtailing ostinato,
breathes soaked as self-pitying woe.

The city abode confines me with
a strange solitude, yearning to disperse.

Feet crawl on broken pavements
obedient in structure and anatomy –
they pace with diligent trust in my heavy head, though-
they should beware
this head is too fruitful
for small talk
and
hollow prayers.

They settle with a blur,
accepting the inevitable-

tomorrow will rise like today,
a repetition of yesterday.

Mona Attamimi

Written by mascara on May 19, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Mona Zahra Attamimi is an Indonesian-Arab. She lived as a child in Jakarta, Washington DC and Manila. She moved to Sydney at age ten with her family. She has studied Anthropology and Women’s Studies at ANU and ISS in Holland. Currently she is completing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. She enjoys writing poetry and short stories. And through writing and reading, she is interested in exploring diverse experiences of cultural displacement and marginalisation. Her poems have appeared in Southerly and forthcoming in Meanjin. She is an editorial assistant for Mascara Literary Review

Drifter

In my hard boots
I wandered into a field of thistles
crushing violet weeds,
bits of bricks and tiles,
broken glass from a house

I once knew. My mouth was wild,
foaming her name. I heard my child’s
moonless moaning and my house
bursting into a cake of flames.

After the rain, by the river-death,
I slept for a night in the shadow
of a broken boat. I piled humus
under my head and dreamt
of a throat

tangled in weed,
white as bone, my wife’s
goosefleshed thighs floating
in the swamp that sank
our river-home.

As I fold and unfold
a sleeping bag
by an alley and a railway track,
I brush away
the phantom of a man
drinking coffee and breaking bread
inside his daughter’s home.

Now, my hard boots hide
crooked toes,
crack bush burrows,
barks, twigs and lie
about the state of my soles.

Mangosteen

Do not say a prayer, shed a tear,
nor place a wreath on my grave,
but bury me instead under a mangosteen
tree once I’m stiff like lead.

Once I’m dead, drip mangosteen milk,
and wring the sweet white arils
till its juices soak
my funeral shroud. And when I die,

embalm my head and tuck
my teeth in black-purple rind,
let the mangosteen roots coffin
my bones, skin and spine.

When night comes, let me rustle the leaves
with my ghostly arms, and let me
scare the thieving monkey that climbs
on its fruit-bearing branch.

Once I’m freshly dead and buried under
the fallen fruits, let the soil and grass
pickle my heart and liver
in mangosteen’s heavenly pus.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Written by mascara on May 19, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Indran Amirthanayagam directs the Regional Office of Environment, Science, Technology and Health for South America, based in the United States Embassy, Lima. A member of the United States Foreign Service, he has served as Public Affairs Officer in Vancouver, Canada, Monterrey, Mexico, and in Chennai, India. He is a poet, essayist and blogger in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese (http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com). He has published six collections of poetry, including The Elephants of Reckoning ((Hanging Loose Press, NY, 1993) which won the 1994 Paterson in the United States, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 2008). A new collection of poems in Spanish, Sol Camuflado (Camouflaged Sun) has just been published in Peru ( Lustra Editores, Lima, May 2011).

Off the Field

In the end we have only ourselves to pick up from the grass,
the bed, the gymnasium floor. The dead will have their say
in dreams, and fond ones too, how the boy used to laugh

when chasing the ball on Duplication Road, or the girl back
in the village, shyly accept the glance of her neighbor’s son,
by the well, over a garden wall, the victims, the left behind

after the tsunami or the shelling without end, abroad,
processed, rebuilding their lives in the company of
Australians or Canadians, new people, while the distant war

on its nightly visit to parents, single or a pair, does not curse
the kid born away, who loves the latest fad on satellite radio
and the girl in his class who sports an infectious laugh.

Sharing the Load

There are friends who travel part of the way, then drop off
into the woods, I miss them in the darkness and thank them

here for their time–the one who sliced the last stanza off
a poem which later became another man’s favorite to speak

in the ear of love and feel its breath whistle by the lobe,
to eat and be eaten, write as Cyrano de Bergerac, thank you

for giving me the chance to serve. And the other who said
I have a secret country in my verses, that lends color

and light to my images, Alastair, let me write your name
although you said you cannot carry books any more,

that the local library must do. I understood. I have
moved a library through the Americas and the books

are dusty, creased and tired and many still unread,
time to house them with good air flow and a bookkeeper,

somebody else, a young man or woman, my own children,
if they wish to carry the load. There is gold in the paper

and lead, memories of a far-away life, with elephants
crossing at dusk, white ants hungry for pages.

Kenneth Steven

Written by mascara on May 17, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Kenneth Steven’s tenth collection of poems is appearing in the summer of 2012. He’s from Highland Scotland and much of his work is inspired by the wildscape of the north and west of the country. He’s also a widely published writer of prose for adults and youngsters alike, and he translates the work of many Norwegian authors.

www.kennethsteven.co.uk

A Green Woodpecker

The day is like dead wood –
No colours, only shades of grey,

The gentle breath of my steps
Leaves a ghost story written in the grass.

A stillness like that when snow falls
Except there is no snow, and none all winter –

Only the river in its silvering among the trees
Whispers the same old journey to the sea;

Only the moon, low above the hills,
Frail as a ball of cobwebs.

On moss feet, I go into the wood
And a great door closes behind me:

Little quiverings of things
Quick among twigs;

Two deer, their eyes listening,
Flow into nowhere in a single blink.

I look up, into a pool of light
And hold my breath:

Swans stretching north
Swimming the open sky –

The silence so huge
I hear their wings.

And I think,
As I begin to go back home;

I came here searching one bird
And found all this instead:

How like my life.

Otter

light swivels on the night edge:
the full moon’s eerie beam
wobbles like a child’s balloon, huge, and breaks
upwards at last, into the clearing dark

otter trundles over wetscapes, crying
as points of milk-white stars shine clear;
he curls into himself in seaweed
through the swell and ebb of tide until
the oystercatchers drip their calls across the sky
and orange gold the dark melts into day –
then he’s off, a scamper on the sea edge
scenting, searching, circling –
flowing into river edges, a thousand streams
sewn inside the silk of him, for ever

Gillian Telford

Written by mascara on May 17, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Gillian Telford is a NSW poet who lives on the CentralCoast. Her poems have been published regularly in journals including Blue Dog, Five Bells, & Island & her first collection Moments of Perfect Poise was published (Ginninderra) in 2008. Longer poem sequences have twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize & published in anthologies The Honey Fills the Cone (2006) & The Night Road (2009). In 2010 she worked in collaboration with choreographer Francoise Angenieux & composer Solange Kershaw on Poetica: Five Arrivals which featured as a regional event in the Sydney Writers Festival.

displacement

(i)

From the incoming tide
I rescue a stone—
deep olive green
tinged with yellow buff.

Its colours bring echoes
of old growth forest, as though lifted
from leaf-litter, moss and fungi
but stranded here

among the pastel shells,
the bleached and silvered grit,
it’s a misfit
dumped on a tidal surge.

I roll it in my palm, turn
and stroke it with my thumb,
rub away each grain of sand
and hold it till it warms.

(ii)

In waves of harassment, the hostile
natives dive and shriek—
From the fig’s leafy head,
crouched in defiance— a red-eyed

intruder, huge and pale, keeps
them at bay with great snaps
of its bill and raucous cries.
When we’re talking of birds

it’s a summer migrant with many names—
stormbird or fig-hawk, rainbird or hornbill;
a channel-billed cuckoo, flown south
to breed and find hosts for its eggs.

As I watch it struggle against the flock,
I think of its journey
across the ocean, grey wings beating,
hour upon hour—

driven by instinct and drawn
to our plenty,
each year they find nurture
despite the clamour.

(iii)

Across theTimor Sea, the boats
keep coming.
Some we hear about, some we don’t—

Some will wait quietly, others won’t.

the third bridge
for my mother

It was a clean, sharp day
cut through with winds
from the Southern Ocean, so we wrapped
her in rugs and pushed the wheelchair
along the boardwalk, through rushes
and reedbeds, the grieving swans
the calling, circling terns.

At the third bridge, we stopped.
Beneath us, a tidal high,
the wind-dragged, surging estuary,
its sun-flecked surface.
And there we took turns to toss
him over— handful by handful,
back to the river, back to the ocean.

But caught at first
on gusts of wind, his ashes
lifted against the light
then circled and swirled in exultant loops
before the final fall—
the quiet passage beneath the bridge.

Ali Alizadeh

Written by mascara on May 17, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Ali Alizadeh’s most recent books include Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011) and Iran: My Grandfather (Transit Lounge, 2010). With John Kinsella, he has edited and translated an anthology of Persian poetry in English, which is forthcoming in 2012. Ali is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Monash University, and has a website: http://alializadeh.wordpress.com/

Words

I can’t find my phone. Plato
couldn’t find the Beyond, denounced

Word vis-à-vis Voice
as inherent poison. This weekend

the planned occupation of Melbourne
by activists, to announce the end

of ‘corporate greed’. I dial a number
and burn the Other’s ear with irony

of hidden envy. No, Word isn’t
the perpetual deferral of a signified. Void

is Truth misnamed, a-voided. ‘Greed’
the very tip of the most visible iceberg

of Capital’s glacial matter. I can’t
stop talkin’, talkin’, don’t care who’s hearin’

the repetition of unfulfilled urge; tomorrow
a song may ‘unite the human race’. Marx

the only dead thing I can’t speak ill of
(who hasn’t sensed a ‘spectral’ Real?)

which makes me hang up the phone. Use
written words to formulate the unspoken

and the unspeakable. Yes, I’m out of credit
and too stingy to finger the alphabet

and text-message bored friends. Capital
-ism may be its own undoing.

Thus Capital

Capital is the Real of our lives.
—Slavoj Žižek

I’m here for an encounter
with Power. Can’t accept It

has nothing to offer but ice-cream
and pink lingerie. I prowl the mall

to catch Its sordid eye. Never mind
the sales, reduced symptoms

disguised as fetish. What haven’t I
disavowed? I’ll serve in the society

of disrobed spectacles. I’ll see
the naughty bits. Ethical consumers

fumble with fig leave; not fair
trade indulgence, what I seek. I aspire

to bow before Its grisly form, kiss
the slimy rings on the all-too-visible

hand of a festering market. Then relish
the stench of Its anus. So free, so real.

Nicolette Stasko

Written by mascara on May 10, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Nicolette Stasko has published five volumes of poetry. Her newest UNDER RATS is forthcoming this year with Vagabond Press Rare Objects series. She currently lives in Sydney.

Arachnology

There’s a spider silk thrown
all the way across
my neighbour’s yard
catching the sun
perhaps four metres or more
a trapeze the acrobat
still waiting in the wings
I realise suddenly
that the engineer
of this Glebe Island bridge is
one of those tiny creatures
never actually seen
hiding in its curled up leaf
a miniature gondola rowing
through the air or
idling precariously
in a moonlit bay

This morning the net is stretched
across my garden
at one end the tracing of a Spanish fan
the other anchored
as if by steel
gleaming and
blowing in the wind
how was it done?
in the secret night
the lone rider spinning and flying
to span such distance
strong enough to stand
the constant battering
strong enough
to hang a week’s laundry
I look in vain to find the architect
of such a grand design

Coming up empty

I have just seen the Queen pounce
from her observation post—
from her sacred stance
on the rooftop
elegant as Egyptian tomb sculpture—
into a hammock of honey suckle

then her departure
out of sight no tail dangling
from triumphant mouth
an embarrassed gait
suggesting wounded dignity

the light is like butter
I imagine her fur
will smell
like blossoms of wild flowers

Testing spaces

Written by mascara on May 7, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

none

1
2
3
4
5

Lindsay Tuggle

Written by mascara on May 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry has been published in HEAT, commissioned by the Red Room Company, and included in various journals and anthologies in the US and Australia. In 2009, her poem “Anamnesis” was awarded second prize in the Val Vallis Award for Poetry. In 2012, she is the recipient of an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship. Lindsay grew up in the Southern United States, and migrated to Australia eleven years ago. She now lives in Austinmer, where she is working on a book of elegies.

The Arsonist’s Hymnal

wake to see if the trains are still running.

the beloved ones coalesce
in the gloaming,
almost persuaded.
in the afterglow of mall glut,
her veiled alien
hastens farther down
this last bathed hall.

have you seen the vapors?

all dead arrive
unborn as lighthouses.
our eldest unfurled below
the stairwell under the baptistery
elevated as a drowning chamber
whose guests have vanished.

her alias is stark. loose-limbed.

summer is almost a covenant.
before darkness
she’s intent on devouring parables.
all others fall away
the consequence of habitual neglect.
ghosts die without ceasing;
guard trendsetters against
the perils of walk-in-closets.

as soon as she’s finished washing her hair.

her materials form only metric tongues.
with solemn vigilance
we can’t be seen
underwater
echoes are laughter.
only these rituals endure:

all night in dreams he sets fire to her eyes.

Anamnesis

She dreamed a cemetery of glass tombs.
The perfume bottles were her favorite.

An estuary arsonist
(eluding self-harm):
she refuses to bathe alone.

River viridity is dangerous:
Honey locusts ghost the salt baskets.

Despite coastal housekeeping
tidal mouths breed
vertical striations.

Nutrient densities render her blind,
hysterically.

Language is no longer a nomenclature.
Even her humming has meaning: a kind of
swirling guttural echo.
Something you knew once.

Thoughtless recovery
          (habitual)
swarms            against the sane
familiarity of lawnmowers,
        the creeping grace
                of      unseeing.

From New Madrid gully inland
we remember the day
the river flowed backward.

In the absence of coherent levees
shifting glacial loess
an unknown number drowned.

The measure of loss
is in the submergence of trees.

There’s an upside to angularity.
Sharpness invites reconstruction.

The moral is integral burial:
illiterate confinement
supernatural as filth.

The madness of trees
ringed in brackish immersion.
Roots mark intervals
of barren impermanence,
hoard pollen traces
in vanishing silt.
The delicate erosion
of Kalopin’s eyes:
residual gladitsia in
backwater muck.

She’ll kind of ramble beautifully
her laughter like bells.

Water collects in
pockets of collarbone.

Divers burn in shallow
basins. One hundred
years later we hunch in
the elongation of aftermath.

She becomes fishmouthed
the obsession of swallowing
written beneath the soles of her feet
another angling glaze.

Assemblage data reveals
a cedar arboreal influx.

Lower soil analysis shows
ragweed is rare or absent.

Cicadas are reckless breeders.

Its been dry for so long here
we made ourselves gowns
from this dust.

Wake.

How to capture
the unison language
of insects?

She’s haltingly fluent
in the vanishing tendency
of the object

where descent
is watery and burns.

An acrid metallic sound,
translated, roughly:

The wet are pretty.
All this
beckoning comes at a cost.

Author’s Note:

This poem responds to two bodies of water in western Kentucky—an area called Land Between the Lakes. The first was formed by a series of earthquakes from December 1811 to February 1812. The second was created following the floods of 1937, and gradually expanded for the dual purposes of flood control and hydroelectric power. Many towns and farms were flooded and relocated. Some residents refused to evacuate, and drowned.

Laurie Duggan

Written by mascara on May 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949. He moved to the UK in 2006 and currently lives in Faversham. His most recent books are Crab & Winkle (Shearsman, 2009), a new edition of The Epigrams of Martial (Boston, Pressed Wafer, 2010), Allotments (Wendell, Mass., Fewer & Further, 2011) and The Pursuit of Happiness (Shearsman, 2012). Forthcoming are The Complete Blue Hills (Puncher & Wattman, Sydney), and Leaving Here (Light-Trap, Brisbane).

Allotment #33

life in the margin:
spring, still winter-like

old men in trainers
walk on bunions

Allotment #34

back at The Sun
(beyond the . . .

I graph all this, with flattened accent
(drawn but not glottal)

(the test: ‘This is Illyria, lady’)

(I myself am a bracket,
a footnote
but this is as it should be

the smudge of a glass
set down on paper

this this this

Allotment #35

the impression of a bottle cut into a wall
above it a trophy (a crown or a hand,
hard to tell in the half-dark

Allotment #36

a morning frost, bent stems
then a clear sky,
ongoing chores

Allotment #37

shadows in the window
seeming people,
spaces between
a flame’s reflection

nails not quite hammered in

a rattle of cutlery

the mechanics of a worn philosophy

my work irrelevant as
an immense puzzle, lifelong

Peter Dawncy

Written by mascara on May 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Peter Dawncy lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne. He has an Arts Degree with majors in English and Philosophy from Monash University and is currently completing Honours in poetry writing. For his thesis, Peter is undertaking a study of Philip Hammial’s poetry through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. He hopes to begin his PhD next year. Peter has had poetry and fiction published in various Australian journals and magazines, and in 2010 he was the winner of the Monash Poetry Prize and came second in the Monash fiction-writing competition. His play, The Logue of Thomas P. T. Lawrence, was performed at the Arts Centre in June 2010.

logue

    satellites coalesce  /  fold

                                  the corners to the

          belt above

                               triangles as

                                                    squid jigs

                      at the jetty’s end

                                in fluorescence by

            the dried

        white-bait clumps

                             snapper  catch

                                     gloves welcome

                                  container ships with

                 coordinates

               for salt meets sky

                        Melbourne woven in it

                                    Eureka deep green

                          iceberg siege

              seen from afar

            by the

        research vessel en route

                         to the Antarctic snowfields

saturnine

darkness

over floodwater

extends

smooth, wet pavement

over stars

murmur

as monkeys march

to flightless geese

flapping.

pour further

wide and windless

a fleece

bobs by

saturnine

fishermen

hauling in mulloway—

take

a picture

and somewhere

a frame discards

its portrait

and searches for a

foreign landscape.

for now, moonlight

skewers a dog’s nose,

bogong moths whirl,

a shadow

opens the door, sneezes,

closes the door—

tap shoes

seem too polished

for a winter worn

underwater.

autumn storm

spiralling tongues
twirl, slash the billowing
gun-powder grit
beneath the blue gum and
above the clamouring
bracken. milk thistles levelled
as dogwoods sneeze, black-
birds dive for the pine copse
and ferns puff dust
from their beards as
they lean and squint. a black-
wood teeters and quakes,
topples as its feet rent
the earth
like a child shredding
wrapping paper. somewhere
in the composting depths
a little girl in a green
and white dress
gets her hair caught
and screams for her mother.

Fiona Britton

Written by mascara on May 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Fiona Britton is a Sydney poet and writer. She was the 2010 winner of the Shoalhaven Literary Award and the 2011 joint winner of the Dorothy Porter Prize for poetry.

Imago

The tune of us
already exists

had I hands to write it
I would,
six-four time over a Balinese tinkle,
but I dream on, handless
inventing skip-beats (tha-rip) to pass the time.

I curve, acoustic,
for twenty six bars
of held breath —
the underground score
of an opera for insects:

my green grocer
my black prince, tap-dancer.

I tunnel out and count myself in.

Zeitgeist

Lowtide:
you made your way on mass
sideways like sandcrabs
a ragged collegium,
full of fight and righteousness
shouting fond arguments
tugging at each other, tumbling
towards the isthmus
across that line you wouldn’t cross alone.
Great numbers meant great courage:
you ventured together
and accumulated faith.

The sun — celestial diplomat —
shone down ultraviolet
and gilded upturned faces
(friends, your sweet lips split,
the fresh skin pinked and puckered).
The wind grew calm:
evidence, you said —
such small miracles
will soon be handed down as fact.
Differences extinguished in the noonday bright,
you stopped your yelling
and prepared for a single, quiet truth.

Back among the blackened mangroves
beside the grey teeth
of the broken jetty
the shadows grow long,
distances stretch.
At this remove
I hardly recognise you, friends.
Voices carry, high as baby birds’ —
gannet, egret, gull.
I listen but the wind snatches words.
Newborn and dismayed,
you turn in circles.

I grow mandibles; I digest things
here without a people,
unsubscribed,
I am bearded, brackish and alone.
New trunks thrust up
like stubby thumbs, from the mudflat.
Here I build a hollow for a heretic
where I can think,
knit fishnet,
kick the dripping boards;
dispute and come unstuck,
and let the biting insects
have my blood.

Ellen van Neerven

Written by mascara on May 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Ellen van Neerven is a descendant of the Mununjali people of the Gold Coast area. She is a recent QUT graduate in Fine Arts and lives in Brisbane.

Cousins

Taking a break from my usual weekend warfare
I drive with my mother through the shifting rain
into Mununjali country
a roo bounds across the road
we meet at the pub and I order an
egg sandwich, orange muffin and a newspaper
on the last ten years of your life
We are cousins
though we grew up on different sides of the axis
different sides of the moon
got to remember
same grandmother
same grandmother
We don’t share memories
You recall a football game against boys
you fell down and
I turned on the fella who did it
This violence sounds entirely
not like me at all
I remember you came to live with us
when your house burnt down
you were amazed at how many socks I had
and you asked me if you went to my school would
you be the only dark girl in your class
This was the first time I realised that
others could see us differently
We drive up to Nana’s resting place
in front of Mt Barney
You take the wheel where I am a passenger
My uncle says you’ll teach me in a paddock
He seems to know all them old stories
While my mother is quiet
Got to remember
same mother
same mother
Used to the flies now I sit under a gum
This land heals all my city blues
I haven’t the language for that
You read me after all this time
I haven’t the language for that.

How My Heart Behaves

My coin purse is lined
with receipts of women I’ve fucked and left
Last night on the bed of a lover
slipping a singlet over my breasts
about to leave
I find myself suddenly desiccated
with need of child
Will I always be
a stranger to the sound of webbed feet
a moon in the orbit of others
I untangle from her sleeping form
Leave all my change under the pillow.

Cui Yuwei

Written by mascara on May 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Cui Yuwei was born and brought up in Xinyang, a small city with beautiful hills and clear waters in central China. In 2005, she obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Central South University, where she studied as an English major. Shortly afterwards, she continued her study in Wuhan University and learned creative writing from Ouyang Yu, a renowned Australian poet and writer. In 2007, she completed an MA in English Literature there. After graduation, she moved to Zhuhai, a southern city in China. Currently, she is an English teacher in Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, while she takes a great interest in writing poems and short stories.

Mother

We sat at dusk.
On the pebble walk we saw a child
toddling,
his watery lips shimmering in the westering sun.
A slim shadow of his little figure
fell like a petal
on my feet.
I heard the lines she said:
One day when I’m too sick to speak,
or kill myself,
I want a lethal injection to end it.

Slowly descended these words,
as light as feathers;
they brushed by my leg,
twirled to the soil,
as if expecting no one to listen.

Michael Sharkey

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Michael Sharkey has taught writing and literature in many universities in Australia and abroad for the past thirty years, and has published over a dozen collections of poems. He lives in Armidale, NSW, and travels between Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.

John on Patmos

(Hartman Schedel, Poland 1440-1514: Queensland Gallery)

Real estate is wound up here:

where a path spills down to the sea;

no magnificos’ villas encroach:

the fish are allowed to be free.

An eagle, head bent like a quizzical heron’s,

keeps watch as the writer,

inkwell in hand

sits by a Matisse palm tree.

Above, remote, a child on her lap,

a woman’s enthroned on a cloud:

the writer sees no strangeness there;

his head and eyes are bowed

toward the text upon his lap

where stranger things appear:

the world in flames and children

weeping as it disappears.

The Nameless

Dreams grow refined

but hardly appear to get better:

the plot is the same:

the window or door

that silently opens

and two hooded figures

come in through the dark

of the room

to the side of the bed:

the dead siblings or parents

or children approach once again

to steal sweetness from sleep.

Brook Emery

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Brook Emery has published three books of poetry: and dug my fingers in the sand, which won the Judith Wright Calanthe prize, Misplaced Heart, and Uncommon Light. All three were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

The black hill looks to float straight out to sea.
Cars incline. But the driver’s eyes are raised
to an unvarying wash of night.

For a moment, just an instant, his gaze

is arrested by a tree beneath a streetlight,

a lean, straggly, unkempt bottlebrush he thinks,

and strangely, beneath the light, it is the focus

of his thought. It’s almost two dimensional,

as though it were the section of a tree

pressed between two sheets of glass

for microscopic examination. It stands for nothing

but stands as something, its shapeless branches

and drooping leaves as nondescript

as any failure of a man, any thought

whose time has come and gone and gone again.

He’s nearly home. It’s about to rain,

the wind is getting up and he can sense

an approaching chill. He’ll be home before the storm.

He’s shut the door. Locked the outside

outside. The gathering dark, the gathering cold,

all the unhoused, creeping possibilities,

the distresses of the day, tomorrow’s fears,

wolves howling on the Steppe, hyenas

around the stricken cub, roaches, slaters, snakes,

the tubeworm deprived of light, no mouth,

no anus, dependent on bacteria

to process food, the nonexistent nameless dread

that nonetheless exists with rapists, goons,

gangs of untamed youth, the super-heated words

of presidents and priests, toddlers fastening bomber’s belts,

and stepping out in supermodel clothes, crewcut men

in sunglasses sweeping children off the streets

and banging on the door; the looming nursing home.

The heater’s turned to high. The television

splays its cathode light across the room,

a cup of tea is cooling on the armchair’s arm.

That stupid, ugly tree, he thinks,

the light between its leaves, its immobility,

then the way it twitches in the wind,

what is it that won’t let me be?

All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness
energy or purpose for all the things
I have to do. Charged sky,

sudden light at the horizon, grey, then streaks of blue, then
grey again. An unsettled sea,
white water contending point to point,

waves like another and another avalanche, unceasing noise,
sand compacted to a crimp-edged,
man-high bank and I can see,

then can’t locate, a buoy like a white-capped head
sinking and floating in the rip,
wrenched from its deeper mooring,

now driven in, now swept back out, tethered there
by net and anchor that, for now,
have new purchase in the sand.

Conceivably, should I be silly enough to surf tomorrow
it could be me entangled, drowned:
mistake and misadventure; bad luck.

In Switzerland they’ve flicked the switch and particles
surge round and round a tunnel
in opposed directions preparing to collide

in an experiment to explain how the universe got mass
in the seconds of its birth,
why what we touch is solid.

We stalk the irreducible, the constant speed of light unfolding
though the eye can’t see and the hand
can’t touch such magnitude:

time may shrivel, outrun itself, sag under accumulated weight:
end in our beginning: red shift, white dwarf,
rotten apple on the ground.

Peter Lach-Newinsky

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Of German-Russian heritage, Peter grew up bilingually in Sydney. MPU First Prize 2009. Third Prize Val Vallis Award 2009. MPU Second Prize 2008. Second Prize Shoalhaven Literary Award 2008. Varuna-Picaro Publishing Award 2009. Chapbook: ‘The Knee Monologues & Other Poems’ (Picaro Press, 2009). First full-length collection: ‘The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems’ (Picaro Press, 2010). Peter grows 103 heirloom apple varieties in Bundanoon, NSW.

Other Flesh

Bare front yard concrete driveway, a single

small frangipani shrivels its furrowed grey

elephant skin near the grey paling fence, up

the red brick steps hot in the sun to the threshold:

now speak. German. Another. World.

Brown linoleum hallway, or is it carpet,

to the dining room. Mother there, or kitchen?

Maybe just the spicy dream-world smells

from an Asian boarder’s cooking,

into the bedroom shared with Omi

where mornings we play ‘I spy’ in German,

the armchair with the polished dark

brown wooden rests that prop

my arm holding up a child’s head heavy

with listening to the white wireless,

the wide glowing dial, little green neon wand

I can move to the unknown reaches

of the unseen world full of soft maternal

English voices telling Argonaut stories,

the thrill of Tarzan’s chest-beat yodel,

Clark Kent closing the phone booth door

followed by Superman’s bullet flight,

the dial against which, listening, I press,

peacefully embalmed in fantasy like a baby

at the breast, my small nibbled thumbnail

to see the warm light

coming through all

that other flesh.

Besuch/Visit

contours in the sand/ konturen im sand
combed wind, wires/ gekämmter wind, drähte

up there at the estuary/ vorne an der mündung
a sudden thought of you/ dachte ich an dich

been there again clawed/ wieder da gewesen verkrallt
into branch moss/ am ast das moos

dragonfly wings about the heart/ libellenflügel ums herz
lightless/ lichtlos

Resumé

bröckelnde bäume der lunge

harzverklebte nüstern

das herz klirrt

die scheibe zerspringt, das messer

dies der tod der luft

crumbling lung trees

resin-gummed nostrils

heart pounding

the pane shatters, a knife

this the death of air

mohnerinnerungen verblassen

hart der strassenrand und gerade

nagle im schuh

möwe grell über der halde

dies der tod der krume

poppy memories fading

hard road’s edge, straight

nail in shoe

gulls livid over the dump

this the death of soil

kein sinken wie Ophelia

ranzige bretter, kellerasseln

das pferd verquollen

zahnlos, gischt

tod des wassers

no sinking like Ophelia

rancid planks, wood lice

bloated horse

toothless, spume

the death of water

im spiegel das gesicht wegrasiert

fern gewinkt, schon ans telefon

fliessend k/w und zH, abgelenkt

lebenslang vom staunen

dies der tod des feuers

face shaved off

in the mirror

half waving from afar

already phoning

running h/c all mod cons

distracted lifelong

from the wonders

this the death of fire

Acknowledgement: ‘Other Flesh’ has appeared in ‘The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems’ (New Work Series Picaro Press, 2010)

Sam Byfield

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

1981, Sam Byfield has published a chapbook (From the Middle Kingdom, Pudding House Press) and his first full length collection Borderlands is forthcoming. His poetry has recently appeared in such publications as Heat, Meanjin, Island, Southerly, The Asia Literary Review, The National Poetry Review, Cordite and previously in Mascara.

Split Earth

Morpeth’s bulging river and rich

farmlands, the sky heaving itself

down in great drapes.

We browsed the bric-a-bracs

and lolly shops, climbed

an old steam engine and listened

to the rainsong of frogs amongst

the ferns and old stone walls.

The bridge rattled, its heavy presence

hanging on into its second century,

shading the flash of reeds

and river mullet. While the women

drank coffee I walked with Thom

to where the gardens met the river,

took a photo of us, arm-in-arm,

obvious brothers despite our

different hair lengths,

despite his axe man shoulders

and my clean shave. Our eyes

were an identical blue, though

not long since the accident his smile

didn’t reach them, cautious as

an animal crouched in barnyard

shadows, relearning trust; his scars

jagged and red, like split earth.

All this year I’ve carried the photo

with me like a talisman,

watched his eyes and mouth

telling different stories, as if I could

stop the world from hurting him

further, from taking any more

of us too soon.

Escaping the Central West

Out on the flat land, the yellow land,

driving from one country town with

a funny name to another, in the old

blue Cortina, the sun making wheat

of dad’s beard. John Williamson’s

singing Bill the Cat, about a moggy

who loved the budgies and wrens

and ultimately lost his balls.

Sporadic signposts, nothing

but sad little dams, wire and sheep.

One flock grabs our attention—

animated discussion in the front,

dad still refusing to unfold the map

before the realisation sets in that

it’s the same flock as two hours

and two hundred miles ago.

It’s a story that’s passed through

the years until how much is real

and how much is myth is hard to say.

We lasted two months out there.

My parents must have fought

like hell, though those memories

haven’t stuck. We headed back east

in the middle of a flood, the whole

Central West beneath a foot

of ironic water. Night time shut

the light out and we drove blind,

just hours of water threatening

to swallow us, to breach

the Cortina’s rust and rivets;

and a storm in Dad’s head

that wasn’t about to abate.

Philip Hammial

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Philip Hammial has had 22 collections of poetry published, two of which were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. He was in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from August 2009 through January 2010.

Affair

We should concern for this affair. Affair

of there ought to be some in kind who refuse to accept

a stand-in (not the first killing that dumped its government)—

white public lovers who dealt as best they could with the spellers

who encroached upon Madame’s overly-ripe sensibilities & were not

in the least bit successful, for, look, there, a naked someone

actualised so close you can smell her as though

she was dead but in fact is still alive, just back

from a holiday in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,

some help here) like one of those debutantes who extract privilege

with impossibly dainty fingers, morsels

tidy, morsels teeming with, Thanksgiving just

around the corner blowing its horn, strutting its turkey, “When

the saints come marching in” it’s Madame who leads them, baton

twirling, bobby socks dream girl, 1954, I wasn’t in that marching band;

if only I had been I might not have come to this: my life

as a fetish not what it’s cracked up to be, can’t just

walk up to someone & ask for a good spanking, call it

one for the road or one for the angels in the fountain who fall

like hail on the replica of my hard-won grace temporarily won

when I took the hand of a gentle killer & we slipped through

the gate, eluding the Big Boys, the thugs who guard

the Chocolate Farm, a bouquet in my other hand (how

it came to be there I’ll never know) for Madame who refused

to accept it, our affair long over she insisted with a smile

that she’d acquired in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,

some help here).

Sartorial

I’ll have it—the courage to wear what I kill. It

being difficult if not impossible to say at this point

in the proceedings when I ended up in bed

with the wrong family because my admirers

(that motley crowd) are demanding one of my fly-ups. Molly,

have you seen my wings? Now that I’ve finally mastered

the art of remembering where I’ve left my glasses

I keep losing my wings. At least with glasses

I can see to find them, no more groping around

on the floor on my hands & knees. Wrong, as in family?

Wrong. Wrong as in now that I’m up & away (she found

my wings in the oven where I left them to dry) at 30,000 feet

the oxygen masks have dropped & begun to sway

hypnotically, a dozen passengers in a voodoo trance

dancing obscenely in the aisles & the rest engrossed

in a past lives therapy session from which they’ll emerge

as clean as scrubbed boys for Sunday school. Me,

I’m with the voodoo mob, ridden, as we all are,

by Mami-Wata, the mermaid who, when she’s finished

with me will leave me with a small token

of her appreciation—the courage to wear what I kill.

Alan Pejković

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Alan Pejković was born in 1971. He has three university degrees in Sweden: an MA in English language and literature at Gävle University, a BA in History of Religions at Uppsala University, and he holds teaching degree from Stockholm University in English and Swedish language. Presently he works on the last phase of his PhD dissertation on liminal figures in contemporary American novels at the English Department in Uppsala, Sweden. Besides academic work, he works as a freelance writer, translator, and book reviewer. His poetry has been published in Swedish, English, and several languages in the Balkan area. He is also widely published in theoretical and literary journals in the Balkans. For BTJ (a leading supplier of media services in Sweden), he regularly reviews books from ex-Yugoslavia as well as books on literature, language, religions and other similar areas.

Sentimental Street

The memory dropped sharply overnight. A freezing point.

Give me a drop of my old street.

Time haunts me, fills me with doubt.

The image of the aged boys, ruined girls, gardens in bloom.

The image flows backwards, changing prisms, transparent crystals.

I stand at the parking place. I sit at my office. Just a point in time.

The street is still a valid point in God’s report on me.

The street punctuates my future.

My Mistress and I at the sunny Afternoon

I am extramaritally yours, my mistress of the erogenous zones.

I stand in your shadow.

You play the violin, I adore your high heels.

Your stocking blasts a hole in my eyes.

Nylon sea. I am drowning. Whistling wolves in my ears. Air rushes from your mouth.

Enclose me in the space between your teeth.

A Boundary Lover’s Poem

I love your fence surrounding me, your words shutting me in, your staying with me till morning fires build up a wall.

I adore that you contain me, insert me into your love.

You have me inside you like a screaming fetus.

You include me in your collection. You form my boundaries.

You add me to your gallery of destroyed borderlands.

You burn my limits to unrecognizable geometrical patterns.

Anthony Lawrence

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Anthony Lawrence has published twelve volumes of poetry and a novel, In The Half Light. His awards include the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize and the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize. The Welfare of My Enemy is his forthcoming verse novella. He lives in Newcastle.

from The Welfare of My Enemy ~ a verse novella

A clear blue day in a black time.
I was waiting, then moved on as the alarm

of my pulse went off. I put two fingers
to an artery in my neck to monitor

fear, confusion, anger, apprehension.
Blood responds to being laid open

to all kinds of emotion. A life of trouble.
I studied track work updates, timetables.

I found stations with waiting rooms.
Those with ticket offices I underlined.

I began my search in the lit confines
of the head. I travelled with your name

and age, the looping swirl of your laugh, idiosyncrasies,
your shoulder scar, your habit of shooting the breeze

with strangers, homeless park-haunters, law enforcement
officers, taxi drivers… Wherever I went

I made notes. I left thoughts on a voice-
activated, digital recorder. The worst

thing was, I always returned with a pain
in my side, as if I’d tried to run a marathon –

a stitch that worked its way into my chest
and stayed there, throbbing. As for the rest

of my searching, my need to find out why
and where and when, I made my way

into the world, bypassing imagination
and its litany of scenarios, and I welcomed

the legal, usual, rule-by-thumb-by-numbers-
and ordered systems of engagement until I was over-

come with exhaustion and information. As a last resort
I drove to Mount Victoria, where we’d fought

over where to go for dinner. Who stormed out
and who gave in, who took the blame, who spent

the night with a blanket and a pillow
on the floor, whose blood flowed

faster, under pressure, who did what
to whom, and why did we constantly shout and fight?

I pulled into an old weatherboard
cinema’s car park. I could hear you, turning over in bed

and shouting, so I turned the radio on. I opened
the door and inhaled the pine-

scented air. Was it snowing, or
was it fog in the parking lights, giving another

angle to a thought of approaching snow?
I had nowhere and everywhere to go.

Lithgow, where we’d gathered magic mushrooms
as the prison lights burned into the gloom.

Bathurst, where we stayed in a bed
for three days in a cold white room in a bed

and breakfast. Jenolan caves, where
you abused a guide because her

flashlight kept wandering while she talked.
We were together and apart. We walked

to and from each other. Now you’re gone.
I’ll keep looking for you, but not for too long.

Your memory is the dull, cracked shell
of a list of words: Loving, Wild, Unfiltered, Dysfunctional.

The nightjar’s eyes are ajar, the little raven
eyes the ground as if it had been given

landing clearance. A ten year old boy
walks under two birds on his way

to the shops. He does not see them
as he is seen, from a distance, by a man.

A man has been watching two birds
above a small suburban park, the hard

morning light unspooling in his hair. The boy walks
towards the end of his life. The man takes

what he needs. Time is under house arrest.
Two birds leave the scene. As for the rest

of the story, reading between the lines
won’t help. What happened has now gone

to where guesswork turns to grief.
The witnessing birds, the belief

that order can be found where
chaos plies its trade. Terror

can be the sound of departing birds
or a child being approached, then led

or carried away to a waiting car
outside Tenterfield, Wyong or Caboulture.

He was into austere Eastern European architecture,
Kraut rock, graphic novels, Elizabeth Taylor,

swoffing for bone fish and baked beans from the can.
He was open, kind, loved animals, box kites, and when

he could, he’d hike into the mountains, camping out
for days. Here is a photo of him, soaking wet

on a cliff-edge at Govett’s Leap. It had been
raining all night. He lived life to the extreme.

He came home with a mountain devil pinned
to his oilskin. His hands were cut and lined

with dirt. He’d fallen as he tried to climb
out of a gorge. Two weeks later, his name

was in the paper. Missing in the Megalong Valley.
The search was on. That was twelve years ago. I see

him where they failed to look, which is where
the track veers left then opens out, under cover

of a canopy of dark, withholding sky.
He’ll not be found. His bones are lichen and clay.

rob walker

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

rob walker has three published poetry collections: sparrow in an airport (Friendly Street New Poets Ten), micromacro and phobiaphobia (and is currently looking for a publisher for his fourth.) He lives in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia, dividing his time between writing and teaching. He is also a member of the unique jazz/funk/impro poets collective which is Max-Mo..

Tropeland. Surreal estate.

In the Land of Trope
boxes of matches spontane combustiously,
self-ignite like passion.
Vampire bats appear as garbags snagged on barbed-wire fences
Butterflies float skyward like liberation

In the Land of Trope street lights go through the phases of the moon
while the real moon waits for the traffic lights to change.
Deep serene ponds resemble your eyes and babies’ cheeks are gardenias

In the Land of Trope ears roar like the ocean
when you hold them up to your shell.
Cellos are the waists and childbearing hips of
country girls.
Cotton wool confined
to bathroom cabinets knows it’s a cloud
forming over the ranges.
The day sky tries to be as blue as the child’s pencil
while the night
leaves itself deliberately empty
for the distant sound of a lone
dog

In the Land of Trope sweat from armpits impersonates
cinnamon bark and vanilla pods
Similes assimilate later as comparative as a comparison

In the Land of Trope dark sky splits white lightning apart
and all poetry is black except for
the pink bits
Silver coins are rain-filled sheep hoofprints.
Clocks at 2 a.m tut-tut that you’re not asleep.
Mountain scenes are almost as realistic as paintings.
Surreal estate.
Every autumn leaves fall
in love.
Drums beat like a
heart.

In the Land of Trope dogs feel as sick as a man
wheels are as silly as eccentric children
and tacks never feel flat.

In the Land of Trope rainbows come blank
so you can colour them in yourself
from ultra-yellow to infra-green

In the Land of Trope pins are as neat as houses,
rabbits breed like the poor. A whip
is as smart as a sadomasochist

In the Land of Trope
money is mute and
humility talks.

In Tropeland
It’s better for you

And metaphor me

Sluggish returns

The dew dragged that giant slug from
the retaining wall again last night

Perhaps he was indecisive
on the up/ down question

Perhaps he has a one-second memory
and constructs his journeys randomly

Perhaps he was lost

Perhaps he just wanted to leave me
a silvered graph of yesterday’s
All Ordinaries Index

Poetry of the New Millenium

it’s all entropy
and things bleeding
into something else.

i’m tired of hearing
about your lover
and shards of things.

your journey holds
no interest.

your maw
is just a mouth.
shut it.

Mal McKimmie

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Mal McKimmie’s first volume of poetry, Poetileptic, was published by Five Islands Press in 2005. Poems from this collection were developed into a feature program by ABC Radio National in 2006. The Brokenness Sonnets 2 was published in Take Five 08 (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, UK, 2009); other poems have appeared in Australian anthologies and journals. The following poems are from The Brokenness Sonnets & Other Poems, to be published by Five Islands Press in 2011. Mal lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia.

His and Hers Homunculi

When I knocked on your door & you opened it smiling
the beam in your eye
knocked me & my mote flying.

Assured you were a placebo & I was in the control group
I took part in this experiment.
It was all a lie — I have the symptoms to prove it.

In the morning I will tell her how a fat, buzzing, blowfly-yellow moon
flew into the car & beat its wings against the windscreen while
I drove through the night to her door.

This morning I opened my door to the conclusions of Loss:
bouquets of poems, a tideline of foam-white flowers.
I wonder when I will meet the lover who sends them to me from the future.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, Rilke advised.
Berryman thought Rilke needed to ‘get down into the arena and kick around’.
(Henry said Rilke was a jerk.)

Would I love you if Neruda did not write:
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
(I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees)?

Orgasm, a scopolamine moment—
briefly, as in a police line-up:
all the usual suspects.

‘You are not alone’ the Goddess sang, dancing around my grave.
And finally I heard the legend of Eurydice’s head.

In the dream, the fact that I was dead
enabled me to write the poem
that I gave to the beautiful woman.

In the language of the deaf the sign for beautiful is beautiful,
the sign for calm is calming,
& love & happy each require both a hand & a heart to be invoked.

Shy man, 45, GSOH, NS, SD, Tourette’s syndrome,
seeks beautiful woman 18-25, GSOH, NS, SD, Echolalia.

Her: Poetry is like sex, it goes round & round; that’s why I’ll hang on with you.
Him: So I’m a good poet, but a bad lover?

Curse the prosaic who reduce the aim
from loving to living, from O! to I. (Diminishing even punctuation.)

The fourth magus was a woman.
She turned from the Bethlehem star & gave
her gift for the child to her own children.

Only if I move this glass paperweight
will the snowflakes inside it fall soft as syllables
on her skin, her upturned face, her hair.

In the hospital-fever nightmare, her father was the attending doctor
handing her not the child but the placenta
& ordering that it be raised to adulthood.

The lonely man with his ear to a drinking glass against the apartment wall;
not to hear his neighbour’s words, just to know she’s there.

Her: Aieeeearrrgh!! %$#*&^@*&^%$#@!!
Him: We’re having a baby! We’re having a baby!

The world continues because women were once children.
The world is imperilled because men were once children.

You were a 5′ 6″ upturned hourglass; we were in the kitchen;
& all the women I had ever loved passed before me one by one
while I cooked a perfect egg.

from The Church of Doubt

(whoever has ears to hear should hear)

I am telling you that you do not know Love.
You throw the word at this person, that:
—I Love him, I Love her—
You throw it even at the whole world, & at God.

But it is a ball that bounces back to you, the same
Colour, the same size:
Nothing has changed.
So you throw it again, & then again.

Do you think that when I say the word Love
It returns to me?
It travels through the hands of all because none can grasp it,
Travels through wood, metal, earth, through infinite spaces.

At the very end of a universe that has no end
There is a child who has been orphaned by religion:
Its only desire is to play,
Though play cannot be said to be a desire.

When I utter the word Love it travels
Over weeping distances to that child,
Becomes a ball in its hands
& there it remains.

VI.

If you ask me if I believe in God,
I shall say No.
If you ask me if I disbelieve,
I shall say No.

I have one foot on soil, on earth,
That is to say: in the tomb.
I have one foot in water, in ocean,
That it to say: in the womb.

Why should I want to live but not to die?
Why should I want to die but not to live?

Before birth, I was or I was not.
After death, I will be or I will not.
Between birth & death I AM.

The brain is of the body
& shall die with the body: There is no Mind.
What is not of the body or the brain—is Soul.

The brain is of the body
& shall die with the body: There is no Soul.
What is not of the body or the brain—is Mind.

Soul & Mind—One & The Same.
& One & The Same is also something else
Which is neither Soul nor Mind.

A word in a bowl; Bowl another word:
Soul fills Mind, Mind empties from Soul.

The Christian empties his Chalice; the Buddhist
Empties his begging bowl.

Arm in arm, Thirsty and Hungry go into the tavern
To eat meat, drink wine, & sing.

VIII.

For members of The Church of Doubt
The way forward at every crossroads
Shall be revealed by where, dizzy from turning, they fall.

& each time they fall they shall fall
At the feet, the jumbled bones
Of a corpse

& two bones shall point them in a new direction:
Wish Bone & Funny Bone.

& for a short time thereafter they shall know the way
& knowing it shall dance as a corpse dances
Just before it becomes a corpse:

As if dying of joy.

Ali Jane Smith

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Ali Jane Smith’s first poetry collection, Gala was published in 2006 as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program. Her work has appeared in journals such as Southerly, Cordite, and Famous Reporter. She has recorded readings for audio Cd and performed in schools, universities, pubs, cafes, shopping malls and festivals. She is the Director of the South Coast Writers Centre.

Poems as Dolly Parton: A real live Dolly

Up close you can see
the texture of my skin.
The smile that was always mine
the eyes full of thoughts
of you and the other people
I care for. Of the world
and what can be done.

If you take my hand it will be
the hand that you know.
The touch that you have grown
used to and never grown used to.

The voice most of all
shows the things that change
and never change
like a long, long love affair.

It’s easy to hear what’s been lost:
the range, the clarity, but
in my voice now you’ll hear
all the joyous moments
inspired thoughts, desolate
hours, true griefs, and loving gestures
you have known.

Poems as Dolly Parton: Only Dolly Parton album you’ll ever need

I know you love
the dirt-poor dreaming girl
who lets you forget
the hours and pains in
writing, singing, playing, looking pretty.
The show that lets you forget the business.

I know you like the stories.
You like my heartbroken women.
My happy singing women. My ruined
but still hopeful
lost and longing never despairing
picked up and dusted off
women who know the cold truth and carry it
alongside warm hopefulness.

You look at me as I
smile out at you from your tv
a photograph or the stage
when I sing and laugh and let you see
a glistening tear that doesn’t spill.

You want me to mend
your hurts and forgive.
To see the good in you, but
the pain and cruelty as well.
To know
and still love you.

Marlene Marburg

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Marlene Marburg is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne College of Divinity. Her research is focussed on the relationship of poetry and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Marlene is a poet, spiritual director and formator. She is married with adult children, and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Moving Images

Wurrunjeri earth,
skin and muscle bulldozed
to raw and slippery flesh.
Deep rivers turned shallow
slush upside down

Water like wind
finds the empty places
It wants to whirl

The earth-shapers are stopping erosion;
moving piles of dirt from here to majestic there.
Progress demands intervention, they say.
They erect a good will sign,
Rehabilitation Project,

but many of us are old enough to know
the banks of the local creek
are little changed in thirty years.

By October, the stench settles.
Crystals on the banks twitch in the light.
Dust fog begins to rise.

Walkers inhale the disturbance,
coughing debris out and in
Oneness with the earth is closer
than we think

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
Nick Cave sings, and the wind is alive
to his song, and the water
knows to seek its own level

Whorls

The ammonite in my hands, gazes
from a mysterious, soul-breathing centre,
recognising we are kin in the cosmos, Jurassic heritage,
forming and transforming fossil and flesh, hardened

and polished like marble and slate, cool
spiral labyrinth, narrowing path to the holy of holies,
birthplace outgrown, time and again, the dark place
edging forward into the light. It is as if she struggles;

albino lashes languishing in her burial rock.
Wine stained strands float from her like mermaids’ hair.
Cavities are filled with coral crystals,
pearls from a stowaway rape.

The ammonite is clothed in delicate embroidery,
golden imprint of once green clusters flourishing on a sea bed;
We animate them in the theatre of imagining, mirror
the infinite mind giving shape to desire.

Returning the gaze, I bridge the vast gap of time,
explore her colour and shape as a once-lost sibling.
Ammonite sister and Abraham’s lost son
see the whorls in my fingers and the mirror of self.

Michele Leggott

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Michele Leggott is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. She has published seven books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007) and Mirabile Dictu (2009). She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland. Michele was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to poetry. See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp

te torea / the oystercatcher

trebling stage left
and how would you ever
pick them out on the rocks
until they move and orange sticks
poke and shrill at the kids who want
food and probably flying lessons
same old same old torea not in
Native Animals of New Zealand
but certainly one of the cards torn
from the jelly crystal packets each week
always three and often duplicates
what were we learning and why is it stuck
in the active grid this morning
looking at Motukorea their island and Motuihe
where a goose jumped out of a boat
on new year’s day and danced
for lettuce from a bucket oh he’s
too little to leave on the farm they said
and rowed back out to the yachts
bobbing off Von Luckner’s bay

dogs rode in the bows of kayaks
landing we supposed on other parts of
the island famous for its permeable approach
to security Pearl chasing down the Moa
out there in the sparkling waters of the gulf
and they got all the way to the Kermadecs
with their charts sextant and radio
and their pantomime imperial flag another story
outside the cordon of plastic ribbons
on the landward beach and a sign
DO NOT DISTURB THIS BIRD gazing
absently out to sea just above
the highwater mark a jelly card swap
an indigene without sound and this book
that comes into the house today
trebling calling catching itself
on the black terraces above the tide
Maungauika and the winter stars rising
over my northeastern shoulder

the answers

it looks impossible but really
it happened is happening the table top
bright red and the little chairs
each with a decal on its creamy enamel
the continuous tea party
that seems to be taking place whenever
we look whenever we ask
what was that where are those baths
that merry go round she rides
with one of us the plank and sawhorse
seesaw in the driveway the baby
stomping along in the sunhat
with her mother and the mountain behind
is that her on the path with presents
and why are his fingers bandaged

it is the moving that matters
the two of us and her walking to camera
at Pukeiti the waterwheel beating
along the cool ravine or the Rinso box
and one of us running and jumping
under the clothesline rocking the pram
one taking out the other with the business end
of a hobby horse silent howling
swimming and getting stagily into the car
the circus the fire engine a donkey ride
at Ngamotu Fishers’ bach Dees’ bach
Onaero Urenui Mokau ordinary things
and behind them the extraordinary grief
of watching the toddler on the lawn
fall into her father’s arms

tonight on the cold Wellington streets
I see them walk by coats no longer over
their arms but the ring from Stewart Dawson’s
glinting on her hand there and on mine
and on mine here extraordinary grief
and the answers we make
from distance which is no distance at all

te oru / the stingray

hot blue stars at the edge of the world
some like horses some like music
and one has a saxophone
we’ve got chalk words and lots of food
we’ve got the saxophone
blowing us out to the edge of the world
where the poems are

orcas arrive in the harbour
hunting stingray the researchers
who named them have tracked the pod
from the Kaipara and say it is unique
in taking on the rays maybe maybe not
the whales frolic all morning
and when an escaping stingray
soars on camera ray skips lunch
with orca an old story flaps into view
stingray in the boat crew jumping about
trying to gaff it the whacking tail pain
my father’s bandaged fingers
held up to the whirring camera his salute
to the fish to us and to her

hot blue stars at the edge of the world
cool blue bird under the wharf
a new sun climbs into the sky

on this side of the harbour
the tug Wainui and her barge Moehau
are bringing in sand from Pakiri
for the beach at Torpedo Bay
a stingray cruises about the shins
of the kaumatua blessing the sand
the foreshore and the seabed
are not quiet places who can say
what belongs to this green mountain
rearing out of the morning mist

hot blue stars flash of wings
under the wharf kingfisher bird of omen
tell us how the sun lights the new moon
how kites with sting tails float over Orakei
how an old story encircles the gleaming bay

Sue Lockwood

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Sue Lockwood’s poems have appeared in Island, Heat, Antipodes and 14 magazine. In 2003 and 2011 she was a runner-up in The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and in 2007 received a Literature Board grant from the Australia Council. She teaches creative writing in Melbourne and is a member of the writers’ group, Io.

Relocation

for Jennie

I find the bag of bulbs you left
and recall your instructions
to plant them this autumn.

A moon calendar shows
in green wedges
optimum phases,

each of them two,
two and a half days
in earth and water signs.

I’m not sure if bulbs are annual
or perennial, if first or second
quarter is preferable.

My one concern is to get them
into the ground
while the moon is waxing.

When you come home to visit
this winter, some will bloom –
jonquil, hyacinth, daffodil.

Landing now so near to the equator,
I wonder how the moon affects
the sun of your arrival.

world view

We are mad with vantage points yet nothing isolates itself
not a parcel under plain wrap, not even meaning.

Take boats in the harbor, masts kissing in the wind,
making and unmaking the sign of the cross.

Single out the brightest boat and no matter how
you fix the scope, nothing you do can make you unsee
the image that rocks in the cove of your eye.

You wish your dreams were Mandelbrots
but all you get is a Multiplex, a squalid night in neon-land
that shunts you into dawn.

Sick of this you slap on boots and trek inland.
The desert has no vantage point, no point of view at all.

You swear you see The Horsehead with a naked eye,
but then the vast silences always were available
when we lay us down.

You meet a man who sets darkness alight
when darkness is all he craves.
Art should serve to remind us, he says.

What’s the after-life, after all, but consciousness lit up
and sent ahead. Gilled creatures live next to him
on the desert floor.

The original ocean is this close, an amniotic fluid holding
the world together.

Desh Balasubramaniam

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Desh Balasubramaniam was born in Sri Lanka and raised in both the war-torn Northern & Eastern provinces. At the age of thirteen, he fled to New Zealand with his family on a humanitarian asylum. During and upon conclusion of his university education, he spent considerable lengths of time travelling on shoestring budgets through a number of countries, often travelling by hitchhiking and working various jobs. His continuous journeys have further evoked his passion in expressive art and embarked him on the endless quest in search of identity. He is the founding director of Ondru–Rising Movement of Arts & Literature (www.ondru.org). His poetical work has appeared (or are soon to appear) in Overland, Going Down Swinging, the Lumière Reader, Mascara Literary Review, Blackmail Press, QLRS, the Typewriter, Trout, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and various other publications around the world.

The Zoo

[i]

Fate of war—shunned

to a strange land

‘Paradise’ said the coloured brochures

Refuge for the abandoned,

honeymoon pictures

Left at unversed doors,

new mother, a father—fern trees

Skeletal abode (a two-room home)

Six ‘curry-munches’ crammed (given

names)

[ii]

Solitary walk to school (a week late)

Shortened route through Saint Francis church

And in crucifixion

Christ smiled at the new boy

Across the painted gravel (black followed

white)

Arrival with the street flash of amber

next to ghosts of raised collars

Vultures in little clusters

Barely spoke theirs (English)

Blank across the muddy face

Stared by blondes and the blue-eyed—

day at zoo

Fame spread to the knotted fence (all in a day)

I wilted

kowhai at midday

[iii]

Dragged along the sports field

Dye of cut grass,

the habitual stain

Face below the bolus clouds,

chewed away

Midrib’s aches—courtesy of nameless stouts

The weathered knees—size eleven shoes

Spat on the frameless face; a freckled senior

Chased daily by the two-legged hound

Living on the same street

with a black dog—his absent father

Brochures of paradise

pealing on the bedroom walls

[iv]

Mother battled (once a believer)

Father struggled (still does)

a liberated prisoner imprisoned

Sisters fared (better)

reversing eastwards over rising mound

Little brother (a chameleon who crossed the sea)

Instead I,

lived / died / lived (barely)

Worse than war! (my morning anthem)

Harnessed a glare

Soiled words

A borrowed face

Self—

no longer mine

Even my shirt; gift of a kind woman

[v]

Days turned the pages of solitary memoirs

Hamilton’s winter fell

over the departed mind

Firewood burned steady

Anger pruned the neighbourhood trees

And painted the empty walls

Fog mourned over the distant mile

Blowing mist; permanent numb

First two years

couldn’t afford the school jacket

Recollection: Days of school 1992

My Country, my Lover

My country,

goddess of adulate flame

Craved by men and yesterday’s youth,

her countless lovers

Slumber of scented hills

Bathed dress-less

in thrust of Indian Ocean

Architecture of her European conquerors

caught in curls of frangipani edges

Mahogany breasts in your palms,

secret passages of jackfruit honey

Her long neck

curved guava leaves

Drunk on her southerly,

I weep

My country, my lover

misled by her lovers

An orphan child

sold and bought in abandoned alleys

Without defined tongue,

speaks in smothered hollow of hush

Her stitched lips

Forced by men of buried hands,

imagery impaired

Bruises—poisonous firm holds

Jaffna lagoon bleeds—weeps

from within to the nude shores

never held

My country, my lover

like my first love,

died

—in ledge of my chest

Crumpled rag and I,

the creased servant

Thrown off the berm of eroding clutches

by robed sages growing devotion of odium

Her face in a veil

divorced from podium of speech

World chose instead,

comfort of venetian blinds

At wake, my shuteye

below the lowered knees

in cobras’ glare

my country, my lover

my hands are chained

Smoke of Zebu

Grandfather turned the land

with a pair of humped bulls

Too young to lead the plough

I watched,

spotted coat and short horns

Dung of bull; blood of his ancient breath

A boy I watched,

fall of red stained sweat

Father turned the land

with a mechanical bull

Red tractor that ploughed the path

Too young to turn the wheel

I watched,

treads of the beast; ascend of tipper’s axel

Smoke of zebu; blood of his young breath

A boy an inch taller

I watched,

rise of red filled sweat

Years in exile,

grandfather’s ashes turned

to a palmyra palm

Father withdrawn

beneath beat of an aged heart

In an anonymous land

no longer a boy,

rather an unshaved man

Held to bones of his flesh

—I watch

men of immortal minds

masked in pureness of white

Turn the land

—a liberator’s salute

Plough the loyal breeze

Erasing the fallen history

I watch,

ploughing through pages of a pen

As they turn my blood

filled with corpses

who once had a name

Anna Ryan-Punch

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Anna Ryan-Punch is a Melbourne poet and reviewer. Her poetry has been published in Westerly, The Age, Quadrant, Island, Overland, Verandah and Wet Ink.

Archaeology

With a fingernail

I carved a dry gourd.

Rattling my history

like a bag of tears,

I poured curling puddles

into dusty earth.

I poked their painful edges

broken crusts of memory.

With a toe, extended,

I scraped out a cactus.

Scoring my passions,

multiple as cabbage moths,

millipedes, crickets and

other unwanted plural creatures.

With a calloused thumb,

I decided they were not

objects of beauty or use.

I crushed their stink bodies,

left them to dry

into brittle filings, and

did not stay to see them

blow away in soft flight.

January

Gales increasing on hard rubbish night.

Brown Christmas trees

blow up the road, up the footpath

festive tumbleweeds.

Their evergreen didn’t last long this year

barely curled out 12 days

before they were dragged to the roadside.

Brittle needles crisp in smoky heat.

The television calls to resolution-makers:

dieters, quitters and exercisers.

New sneakers stink with good intentions

but newsreaders warn against exercising outdoors.

This is small news for homes in the suburbs

where all flames are out of sight.

Parched clay cracks around foundations

jagged gaps in the bathroom wall reopen.

Dead Christmas trees drift back downhill.

We can look at the sun without squinting

but hardly notice the smoke.

Sridala Swami

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, DesiLit, and Wasafiri; and in anthologies including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008); Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (India: Penguin Books, 2009). Swami’s first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (India: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, rp 2008), was short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. Swami’s second solo exhibition of photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, opened at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009.

Chromatography

Solvent

Give sleep a chance and know while you do

that very little separates it from death. Rent

your language by the night. Pay your dues:

Filter

plant your dreams and watch them grow. Consent

to their eventual departure and separate view

of you from where they stand. Discard resentment:

Diffusions

wear your vocabulary like a badge. Few

dreams can survive their naming. Fragments

of your days dissolve and separate into

Separations

impossibilities. Try not to prevent

whatever happens. What happens is, you

will find, your days and nights are never congruent.

Of Clairvoyance

Squelch is not a word heard

under water. Elephants

sink and suck their legs out

of the mud their bellies arches

and beyond, a new world:

green-grey, tenebrous

weeds float like visions

behind the eyes of drowned

bodies or like harbingers of

lost sight.

The ground beneath their feet

not yours.

Breathe, breathe

beyond the last breath.

Tumble into the amphibious.

Clear and buoyant is the sky:

the elephants know this with one

half of their bodies.

With the other they see through mud

and see it for what it is.

All visions begin upturned and colloidal.

Jo Langdon

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Jo Langdon lives in Geelong and is currently completing a PhD (creative thesis plus exegesis) in magical realism at Deakin University. She writes poetry and fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Whitmore Press poetry prize.

Garlic

I’m reminded of a time my mother

chased garlic down my throat with

spoonfuls of jam & honey,

ousting a broken fever, her face

stitched tight with worry

over my penicillin allergy.

My Dorothy shoes kicked softly

against the polished doors

of the kitchen cupboard.

She’d sat my doll body on the bench

hours before, crimping my yellow hair

for the party we left early.

This morning, she relates the details of a dream

in which I fall pregnant with six babies,

my stomach filling out like the moon.

As a child I complained she never wore

her wedding dress or rings. It took uncounted

years to see how she wears her love.

I accepted it from the spoon, counting

cloves that glowed like white-eyed stars

as she wore worry on her wrists,

a bracelet of lines, tense as a watch.

Night story

The is day still with winter,

the water brown & duckless.

Before showing stars

the sky turns

blue as the pulse

hidden in your wrist.

You drive me home &

the lit vein of highway

streams with cars like columns

of iridescent ants.

The city fills the windscreen,

moves like an aquarium.

Lights like neon fish & somewhere

a little plastic castle.

I’ll think of how,

sometimes

you wear your heart on your face

like a child.

Tonight your reflection fills the windows,

holograms the swimming traffic.

We assign an easy currency

for thoughts.

You ask for mine &

the ones I’ll give you are,

stars curled around Earth

in a seashell spiral of galaxy;

a little red planet

floating in my eye,

& a pond I want to fill

with coat hanger swans.

Walking to the Cinema, the Weekend it Rained

I watch the rain curl

your hair as we spill into

the black river road.

Street lamps & taillights

reflect & shimmer like flares

or tropical fish.

In the foyer we

lose beads of water to the

salted star carpet.

A constellation

beneath our feet: popcorn &

yellow ticket stubs.

We communicate

wordlessly; sideways gestures

in the cinema.

Pictures on the screen

fall on our skin, colour us

as we crunch candy.

Aidan Coleman

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Aidan Coleman teaches English at Cedar College in Adelaide. He is currently completing his second book of poems with the assistance of an Australia Council New Work Grant.

Astrocytoma

like the worst thing you ever did at school

the news comes steep and ashen

brisk mind to hurt mind

face to broken face

the pea

uncancelled by forty mattresses

clicks the past into place

leaves the future (whatever that was)…

Void

It was one of those restaurants where fish with heads like buses

were bumping against the glass.

I found myself stalled on annihilation;

of things going on despite me, of you alone.

Amongst the talk and laughter of others,

I stared and stared, and couldn’t blink.

Post-op

The head I wake in is airy and painful.

There’s still work going on in there.

Last night, a circle of numbers

and hammers,

forever

slanting away.

I clutched my bowl and sat it out;

thought about another year.

This morning: birds and fair-weather light;

a calm I can’t meet

with my eye.

Meat, sick, disinfectant on/off through the air.

In the next room people are talking about me.

They’re talking inside of my head.

Steroids Psalm

I am fearfully and wonderfully made

The delicate thread of each breath become rope

At night I glow with a Holy insomnia

In the ripe air I taste your promise

So many plots and schemes

Now back from the dead

I have to tell you these things

I have to tell you all of these things

The walls of my room are effervescent

Shakespeare heads and butterflies

I walk through doors and mirrors and walls

Because so much is tied to earth

So much is tied to the earth

I am Henry V on the eve of battle

The guy who is in on the prison break-out

I’m Francis, Churchill, Robin Williams

People stare unconvinced

and I tell them…

Tricia Dearborn

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning Sydney poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, India, the UK, the US and online. Her first collection was Frankenstein’s Bathtub (2001). She was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize.

Fig

I’m stunned by your dimensions

and your presence—

no less impressive than if a brachiosaurus

stood in the park before me.

As I walk around you, gazing up,

your branches weave patterns

that dissolve and form before my eyes.

There are wrinkles at the bends

of your giant limbs, the tip of you

sixty feet above the ground, your lowest

branches curving gently down

to my chest height.

I breathe on a leaf and wipe the city grime from it

with my palm, startled to discover

its faint scent of milk.

Mapping the Cactus

I used to worry when you wilted,

dipping your spiky head

to the edge of the bowl

until (the laboratory years

stirring within me)

I charted your movements

over months, and saw you

in time-lapse

rise and swing and fall

like tides. Whether you followed

sun or moon

or shifting magnetic pole

I still don’t know

unable to decipher

your slow-motion semaphore.

But clearly you didn’t droop

with thirst—bowed

to a power greater than

my small green watering can.

Jennifer Compton

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her book of poetry – Barefoot – was published by Picaro Press in 2010 and her unpublished ms – This City – won the Kathleen Grattan Award and will be published by Otago University Press in July. Her stage play – The Third Age – has been short listed for the Adam New Zealand Play Award and she is hopeful that it will eventually be produced.

How to Cast Off

I poised the needles to do the final thing
you can do for a shawl (before the fringe)
and forgot, forgot how to cast off.

My hands blanked out how to do it and
I have done it a hundred hundred times
I got a fright.

I walked around the house for a bit
but it didn’t come back. I sat.
Learning how not to know something.

I still knew what a selvedge looks like.
And I still knew wool.
I put two and two together.

And worked it out.
Yes, it was late. I was tired. But
casting off had slipped away from me.

Lost Property

Somewhere in the city
I lost the knitting
the sentimental wool
I had unpicked to reknit.

The colour scheme was alarming
but that was what my mother chose
when she was still capable of crochet
so I held my peace and flew her colours.

I had been warned of an imminent loss
the knowledge of loss had thrummed by
so I kept checking I had everything
one hand delving in my shoulderbag.

And more than the knitting is the pillowcase
made by my husband’s mother, now deceased,
she had run it up from a summery cotton frock
with two ties at the top to keep the knitting safe.

My hands know the scarf in progress intimately
I was working away at the royal blue stripe
plain and plain and plain and plain again and turn
the yarn between my fingers running like smoke.

As I rose to leave my train at Upwey Station
a thud of portent hit me – something missing –
my soft bundle pierced by two sharp needles.
And my hands, now, disconsolate as ghosts.

Margaret Bradstock

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Margaret Bradstock has five published books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Other prizes include Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. She was Honorary Visiting Fellow at UNSW from 2000-2010, Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University in 2003 and co-editor of Five Bells for the Poets Union from 2001-2010. Margaret has edited 11 books of poetry and prose since 1983, including Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (forthcoming, Phoenix, 2011). Margaret reads with the performance groups Harbour City Poets and DiVerse, and will be reading at the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

The Malley tree

‘without Ern Malley there wouldn’t have been any Ned Kelly
– Sidney Nolan

Malley as bushranger, perhaps,
in quilted armour
hijacking poetry,
hoaxing a green landscape.
Verb like bird perches

in the heart of a tree,
the sole Arabian tree,
and lovers stroke the ecstasy
of words
trembling into metaphors
before the shadowed rocks.

Nouns like windmills
flagellate the dusk,
water-tanks are armoured
bushrangers storming the horizon,
Darth Vader breathers,
their blacked-out faces

poets, doomed dreamers, fabrications.

Poet without words

“It is incompleteness that haunts us.”
– Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire.

Lyric is not a category
but a dimension of pain,
a dog barking to the high notes.

Garbage trucks awake you
from pre-dawn nightmare,
long-ago music of garbage-tin lids
mutated through plastic. Three bins,
no music, choose your week carefully,
your cycle of fragmentation.

You dream tidal waves,
                the seas control you
emptying one into another.
Working to balance the board, the words,
             you end up arse-over.
Same wave, same water,
             the wind a perfect north.

Poetry is out there,
news from another front
leaking across the divide,
weeping under doorways,
glaciers once grinding
their way into the valleys.

On the bald hillside,
stripped vertebrae of a Halifax bomber
like an ark or ribbed galleon,
the bodies interred further down
under a cairn of stones,
we trade our lives.

Nicholas YB Wong

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com

Walk With Words

“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”
Wislawa Szymborska

Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant
urging me to make choices –

The night chill challenges my social life.
It asks why I commit myself to words
and turn away from humans,
who often talk too much.

Temperature has no speech – it never knows
the setbacks of language.

I have married words. Every night,
I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,
working towards perfect orgasms.

Tonight, I am not writing. I walk
in the bituminous street, feeling bitter
after seeing my friends whose life
is made of unpronounceable stock codes.

My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,
brittle, belittled.

I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –
Not there.
I look back and ask the street how far I will walk

alone

Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker

Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.

Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.

Mark Twain, a heavy smoker
(and literary
                         figure) himself,
is going to rule our city. And he,
                         with his humor and flare,
has decided to set free all
                          underground smokers.
In his inaugural ceremony, he strides
                          onto the stage,
his forefinger curling
his moustache
          when he speaks:
                                           “I won’t bow my head and
confess like a child. I give you all freedom
             in an adult style.
             To cease smoking is
the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know
because I’ve done it
a thousand times.”

You, who exterminated
that thing
in the city,
must be dismayed
to know the law
is dead.
That law, an infant, which cries no more,
barely knows how to toddle.

That thing –
as you insist calling it –
has a white sinewy-lean body,
a mini-chimney,
paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit

in absolute silence.

I’m warning you! That thing is returning
                       at full speed. And this time,
                       you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak
of its real name
as you do when you name
Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one
                     rolling over you naked.

During those bleak days, we felt like
fugitives
in the name of the hoary
addictive.

                                                                                               We hid in the darkest corner
in universities, diners,
at rooftops, anywhere so long as
                    they were invisible on maps,
                    puff
                    ing
                    and breath
                    ing
at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.

Soon we will hang a Mark Twain
                      flag outside our windows.
                                                        His face
                      soars in proud smoky air,
when we fondle with
that thing
                       legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the                City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.
You then will die gradually
                     of second- and third-hand
smoke, and we,
                   devoted chain smokers,
will die faster. Don’t worry.
                   Don’t dissuade –

we are all prepared. Everything dies
                            on a predetermined date,
                  including the law
you once                                                                                         embraced.

Ashley Capes

Written by mascara on April 24, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Ashley Capes teaches Media and English in Victoria. His first collection of poetry, pollen and storm, was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008, and his second collection Stepping Over Seasons was released by Interactive Press in 2009. A haiku chapbook Orion Tips the Saucepan was released by Picaro Press in 2010. Recently his work has been awarded a commendation in the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize and in 2009 he won the Ipswich Open Poetry Award with the poem ‘shell.’

old green paint

beneath the bridge
where the busker and his flute
compete with
urine and the yarra,
a school girl drops a coin
into his case
and her friends giggle

down from the bridge
boats are lined up
like water-proofed hawkers,
no better at boasting than
old green paint
on the staircase,
or the predictable swish
of a waitress alfresco

and across the bridge
flinders street station
lies sun-bathing,
fake-tan yellow fading
and the rhythmic
click of the train
becomes the wrist-watch
of a patterned vein.

by the curve

a teacup sits on the sink
shoe-brown
inside, imagined marks
where you held it,
not by the handle
but by the curve, to fit a palm
aching from winter

and the rest of the kitchen
looks a little strained –
ant-killers nest against
the foggy window and
cutlery stands like a palisade

but somehow your teacup
shrugs off pain
with a sweeping shadow
cast low over the dish-rag,
to me it looks like you might
return at any minute.

broom-bristle-dance

beneath sunburnt roof tiles
I try to keep up appearances
broom bristles
dancing on concrete
and scattering leaves
like brown paper bags with legs

my neighbour is doing the same
only he’s hiding an alien family
in the caravan out back too,
I’m sure of it
that, and a wig beneath his fisherman’s
cap, hedge trimmers
and a polite face like a button
or a cuff-link

that night a strange glow
comes from next door, maybe he’s moving them
though it could be just the moon, blazing
away, looking over the shed
in a strangely possessive manner
as if the whole town
were his very own chessboard,
driveways and roads
‘L’ shapes for his knights.

Andy Kissane

Written by mascara on April 20, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.

Seeing you again

Driving to your place, I remember
how you said you wanted to carry my hands
around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.
You are married and it’s years since that
dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,
my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.

You said you adored men in dinner suits
and I was eager to strip, loosening
the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly
and carefully, as if they were amulets
with enough power to peel back
my shirt and open up my skin.

You meet me in the driveway, comfortable
in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair
is not quite the way I remember it.
We don’t have much time alone.
Your husband’s making coffee
in the kitchen as words ripen

on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:
fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles
on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,
our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag
zipped into mine, the guttural snores
of lion seals floating up from the beach.

I think of what might have been, waking
to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,
the closeness where you don’t need to speak.
Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite
conversation, the way I look at you and wish
I could live more than one life.

Wood becoming Rock

Walking down the steep path to the backyard,
I hold the stump splitter like a baby.
I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent
on clearing the logs left by the previous owners
—an eyesore, abandoned.
One huge tree, an angophora, fell down
of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase
in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.
I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain
of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder
restoring a classic car.
But what’s left now is the hard stuff,
wood well on its way to petrification—
green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy
for one man to lift. I swing the axe
up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,
then bring it down onto the dumb block.
I make no impression on the weathered wood.
Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,
a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.
The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.
If only I could borrow the Marabunta,
those ferocious army ants from the film,
The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,
then stop right there. But as I remember it,
they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.
I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,
a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled
the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.
My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,
and I am all axe,
as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.
I can’t work, it seems, without making
some connection to popular culture,
though this is not work, this hefting
is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash
blue and yellow at the moment of impact
and I understand how my ancestors struggled
to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done
for the day, but over there,
against the fence lies another
and it will lie there until I come for it—
ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.
I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks
and when I finally cleave through the stump,
the sound of it splitting fills the cave
of my head with the last rays of sunlight.

Anis Shivani

Written by mascara on April 20, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.

The Death of Li Po

Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. The emperors,
on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.

To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a
moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.

In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name
I both abhorred and loved at the same time:

Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life
as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.

Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,
a passage of sorts was enacted. I lost my strangeness.

Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization
still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,

I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its
silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem

inherited among the thousands I most love,
to live through the tough interrogation ahead.

Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. If I drown,
in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters.

To Orhan Pamuk

You have the hüzün, the melancholy
of undying empires piled on each other,
the intrigue of the word-defying holy,
the torture-games of brother by brother.
You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,
an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,
seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,
nodding to the names behind the retreat.
We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs
and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,
dig for first and last names in the old troughs,
defend to the death our identifying stake.
Your loneliness is spared the daily death.
We, the free, delineate each new breath.

Dear Paul Muldoon

Barricade the America behind the Princeton
oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical
language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of
loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;
barricade it from the striptease of hidden views
familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring
the country in birdcages lined with squawk;
barricade America’s broken highways and silenced
cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering
precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers
and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from
whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;
barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,
toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,
a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts
borrowed from other continents, land masses
whose shape resembles fractured skulls.

Judith Beveridge

Written by mascara on April 20, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Judith Beveridge is the author of four award-winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Storm and Honey published in 2009 and it was awarded the Grace Levin Prize in 2010. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature.

Vulture’s Peak

From Devadatta’s poems

Whenever I come here, I don’t pay much attention
to the lammergeier circling from the peaks overhead,
but I keep an eye out for falling tortoises, elephant’s ribs,
jackal’s jawbones. I stay on the level where the farm
women scythe and rick, scythe and rick, or pick

tithes of yellow samphire near the stones. I don’t
climb to the summit to take in the view of the valley
and the fertile plains; or as the Buddha suggests,
spend time alone in one of the small, damp caves
meditating on suffering and its root causes in desire.

I stay at the base near the talus and inhale the heady
perfume of the lavender and vetch. I watch the farm
women bend and sweat in the sinking madder sun
before they drink and rest near the ponds. I let desire
have its ground. I take my chances under falling bones.

Penance

from Devadatta’s poems

Some nights, when all I do is scheme
to give Siddhattha schism, infighting, dissonance,
when I think of what a pleasure it will be
to give him “dissentry” – then I plan some days
of penance: to lie among wood ticks, crickets,
the breaching heads of worms and leeches,
to let the gall borers gnaw my toes;
to offer the soft flanges around the tops
of my ears to the water fleas and wasps.
I’ll let mosquitos gather and fly off pot-bellied
with my blood. I wont apply saliva
or mud, use any unguents, no paste of cloves
and honey, and though the moon will mock me
like a pointed instrument, like a round
and cooling poultice, I wont give comfort
to any part of my body, but cover myself
with nettles, itch-weed, with crow and turkey feathers,
with hen-house refuse so that mites, too,
can leave me scaled and scabbed.
I wont climb away from my skin
even if worms burrow, or web-spinning flies
hang threads in my beard and make slime.
Though my fingernails will have grown so long,
I’ll not scratch a single bite, or strike any insect
down, but I’ll palp them like strange antennae.
Then I’ll lie on the forest floor among the burrows
of roaches and long-horned stag beetles,
and the sound closest to my ears will be the sound
of army ants devouring everything to pieces.

Adam King

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Adam King grew up in Newcastle, Australia. For the past 15 years he has taught English—a decade or so in Osaka and, more recently, in Guangzhou.

Naaz

the cow likes the music rowing the sun down steps aflame ancient boatload of straw COOL BAR ice cream smile friend one rupee for bananas is it mister I thought and saw 3 boys hand in hand in hand at the flower market mornings evenings walking funny Broadway sweat a reservoir mama baba the onions in her purple bag is there anywhere to park under the water gut he stands over his tiny fire the doors the windows all blues big stitches returning soon too hot to write it down she wears the old chains night of the 10 Kingfishers beating white sheets 2 at a green table bamboo ladder and scaffold day at the races where they burn the bodies ok take the cake Adam’s building 1893 1 for you too on the roof lime and soda pink Ganesh opens all the trick locks welcome HOTEL SEALAND movie star glasses they let the vultures pick them to bits cricket crackling over the radio start at THE NAAZ thanks for that Suhail paper stars hang in dirt houses down by the sewer site CO-OPTEX SARI HALL Preeti the sun goes my eyes close what I’ve forgotten the stone men life on the back of a truck steel dust prize always a Wolfgang loudspeaker glimpse of a song a little love tale what else she can’t sit 12 years rust stand under the gateway my 1^st Bristol smoke on a rope how many miles kilometres feet make a grey page on Marine Drive a red double-decker your super fast bus to 100 per cent shakti throwing sparks what time the boat he told me a lighter each year in Sri Lanka slow rosewater cart heat because o I would be a sparrow come here for your crumbs no need for keys cutlet menu bells silver biriyani a bundle of sticks your calling how could he carry that weight over and over where it fits hurts 1 word says it all for the broom prime minister calendar took a week the ferry ride Shiva help him up the bald scabby hill crane tell the 1^st word to Mr Xmas on the taxi licence get the nets from last night’s tide remaining 1893 a is for auto rickshaw 1 coconut pink straw drink daughters barefoot bright about her it is not the colour of the bus I sing transport mode bike tyre marks cycling recycling the wheels of the living structure he is trying to shake Sister Hyacinth could she be ready his arm on the hip stance to attention salute the doorboy rice glue to seal this venture of the heart mud and cardboard you knew the whole deal crank getting a cutter fork I thought laughter when Sammy Seven played that wedding if it’s sincerity get the head nod turned off the nose knows no rose balloon in a torn shirt better empty bolted steel door impregnable barbed wire broken bottles reading grey wall scratches perhaps a cheetah fight the last guest I wrote in a notebook champion brand names from the gods anxious about the burns not hurting you run you expect to catch up the song getting lost around scrap corners painted eyes every day a new window blessing the narrative of the bus salesman all your brothers crows flew into my dream what was it just a chassis bubonic thunderstorm whipping tea in an arc dusk dawn daal to cultivate OM GEMS DK TIME LAKSHMI CEMENT the spray cry of a lotus the flies will ignore the circle you drew around your lunch cockroach chalk what is it called when the breath ends ananda you’re after toys the bus leaves a tree waves the cow likes the music

Susan Schultz

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Among SMS’s books of poems and poetic prose are, most recently, And then something happened (Salt, 2004), Dementia Blog (Singing Horse, 2008), and the forthcomingMemory Cards: 2010-2011 Series. She wrote A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (U of Alabama, 2005), and edits Tinfish Press out of her home in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i. She’s taught at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa for over two decades. Her blog can be found at http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com.

Memory Cards: Oppen Series

The lyric valuables. Your memory will be contained in a cloud. All that’s required is a little bit of feature extraction and data compression to complete the prosthesis. It’s called a “natural language,” this interface between me and my gadget. It does not answer to lament: I have lost my earrings; I have lost my teleprompter; I have lost my mind provokes only information. Unlyric me! I shall be mystic of the Knowing Cloud, on my wrist a gizmo covered by diagrams of slant patterns and draw plays. The poet’s a quarterback; she needs completions. She is only arm, the cloud’s prosthesis. An all-knowing receiver already struts. The only lyric is the lyric of fourth down.

–27 January 2011

There is a simple ego in a lyric, sometimes in a crowd. A man lies on the ground, surrounded by other men. I didn’t mean to shoot you in the face, laughs the boy playing Halo. The man who drowned with his daughter lost his father to drowning. When the guy at Starbucks asked again what I wanted, I said I’m visiting my mother with Alzheimer’s, I’m used to repetition. Two of the mummies were destroyed, to which Bryant said but that’s our future! They found the digital camera; she was smiling, the water was calm. To retrieve the past is not to guarantee it. We used to develop photos, but now they’re downloaded. When memory fails, the eye enlarges to take it in. He said a tourist turned her back on the ocean; a rogue wave threw her on the rocks by the tide pools. Their first aid kit came in handy.

–29 January 2011

I dreamed one night that I was in a hotel room filled with my books. I had a plane to catch, but I couldn’t carry them. Sell them! someone said, but I said I could not. I woke at 3, checked the news of Egypt, then listened to the sound of my own voice cataloguing my mother’s books. To each shelf I said no and no and no. It was as if whatever was contained in them was leaking out, as if memory had less to do with the past than with our attitude toward it, the intonation that covers it like red grease. The tail hook down, cables outstretched, you approach the carrier at a furious speed. Your fighter is but one word scrawled on the deck of a ship whose hold is an ambiguous space, full of men and machines and violence. I was here during the war, he writes, I was / in a house near here tho I cannot find it. The past tense of dreaming becomes the present past: I was. I was here, but now I cannot guide me.

–31 January 2011

This is the sky. This the poem constructed of sky and the children in the square grasping signs, and the parents of the children in the square, and the chanting in the dark space of sky that opens like a lid to its antithesis. The poem never intended to be a dictator, but it insists on form, control, an ordered space. Mine clamps down at the moment of counter-protest; you will not enter this square, it is closed against tomorrow’s sour sunlight, its barricades. The official narrative is of beauty, only. Once upon a time there was a crowd inside a square who sang. Once upon a time the force of their singing dislodged a pharaoh. Once upon a time the unacknowledged were

–3 February 2011

Whether one loves / The world or loves / Shelter / From it it is, if is continues. Tahrir Square is no shelter, though people sleep there. The poem is no shelter, however square. Neither affords protection from a torturer who lived in Texas and Florida. Exported pain is still pain. A man calls out, “Where am I? What is happening to me? Tell me!” No one says, as we did to Sylvia, “you live here; this is your home,” because prison is not home but way station, where way is suffering and station is not shelter. She asked her interrogator where she was: “you are nowhere,” he said. Nowhere is not station or shelter or square; it lacks all geometry. “If you look up you will see something you don’t ever want to see.” The regime demands pre-forgetting. Those you leave behind were blindfolded; you emerge into a part of the city you’ve never seen. It’s outside your history, if not theirs. You can go now.

–5 February 2011

It is the air of atrocity that settles onto the tent-city the square has become. Radhika can’t decide why some words end in –ys and others in –ies; the differences between “gurneys” and “families,” between “armies” and “pathways” are rule-bound, abstract. A young poet tortures himself on distinctions between night and Night, between dawn and its opposite. He writes down ideas he cannot explain, and in not explaining, loses them. The police state parses its words less delicately, demands its “children” go home. Torture is clear speech, though what is gleaned from it is not. I was wearing a blood-stained shirt, one says; it marked him as one of them. I heard myself tell the boy to clarify his grammar, glue limbs to his poem’s body. I asked him to construct a box for his cloud. Obama demands Mubarak clarify his language, spell it out. There’s no future in telling; it’s all show.

–10 February 2011

The vocabulary word of the day is euphoria.

–11 February 2011

The shape is a moment is a monument in process no flash no focus but a flag of our disposition winding around the square circle inside of box inside of cloud faces like voices coming and growing louder then quiet when Al-Jazeera turns to sports then back to euphoria in the circled square young woman in a shawl on youtube (this was 25 Jan) exhorts men to be men and old women in the square their mouths wide open and middle-aged men sweeping white dust with huge fronds and the body functions for once as a system blooms like a flow chart needing more space the lines across which are not final but dipped in martyr’s ink no one wants to leave the square or the circle they sleep propped against tanks against pavement against sharp angles violation of geometries of this body working this body with its stark white bandages over noses and cheeks and foreheads this coming into shape which is so beautiful to see

–12 February 2011

Juggler, why need I invent so much as if always in a space where time falls and picks itself up, replacing scratched post-it notes with new names for what is still a bus, a house, a square. He bears a name; she carries hers. It’s a pod lowered in a mine to retrieve lost men, brought out into a new tense, neither past nor present, but intermediate: yesterday I have been myself. The word “gas” was “chaos” misheard. She sent a letter that never arrived, but made sense of the non-response. Meaning is adopted, names a state that refuses to be still, is found beside a tank in Tahrir Square. The cloths are for wounds or warmth.

–13 February 2011

We are troubled by scratched things as by any touched surface. Abstraction abhors all but the vacuum; vog makes breath mean. It’s not to choose between clarity and obscurity, but to use one in the service of the other. The scratch is tracer bullet over an otherwise chaotic square. What happens next is idea more than event, though one comes encased in the latter like an iron lung that’s only a transitional machine. There’s democracy in the breath, but we’re holding ours.

–14 February 2011

Each of these memory cards begins from a sentence or a phrase from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson (New Directions, 2002).

The memory card form requires that each prose poem fit on a large index card.

Sampurna Chattarji

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, novelist, and translator with eight books to her credit. Born in Ethiopia in November 1970, Sampurna grew up in Darjeeling, graduated from New Delhi, and is now based in Mumbai. Her debut poetry collection, Sight May Strike You Blind, was published by the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters) in 2007 and reprinted in 2008. Sampurna’s poetry has been anthologised in 60 Indian Poets(Penguin); Both Sides of The Sky (NBT); We Speak in Changing Languages (Sahitya Akademi); Interior Decoration: poems by 54 women from 10 languages (Women Unlimited); Fulcrum (Fulcrum Poetry Press, US) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK). Her 2004 translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray is now a Puffin Classic titled Wordygurdyboom! Sampurna’s most recent book for children is The Fried Frog and Other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems (Scholastic 2009). She is the author of two novels, Rupture (2009) and The Land of the Well (forthcoming 2011), both from HarperCollins.Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010) is her second poetry book. More about her work can be found athttp://sampurnachattarji.wordpress.com.

Why

Space Gulliver has gone.
I don’t miss her.

Then why does her going make me think of an evening in a hot northern town I erased from my biography, rarely said the name out loud, as if it were a curse, or a dirty family secret, the dust from the afternoon storm everywhere even with the windows barred, the floor a singeing tawa under my bare feet, barely fourteen, having shut myself up in the corner room to study, despite the heat, despite the fact that no one has told me to, despite my brilliant cousin, a scientist, visiting, who calls me, like no one else does, ‘tui’, despite chilled lime juice cordial, despite the fact that all around me cockroaches with enormous wings are flying towards the uncovered bulb above my head, monstrous, evil brown hard undying fear, despite the fact that any minute one of them may land on my back bent over my books in a cringe of revulsion and despair?

How

Rubidium is a woman she might have liked being.

Odd how the women from the poems keep chasing her through the gullies. Has she let them down? Acrostic, she called across to the long red hair, didn’t you like it? Intuition sucks, and who sees hyacinths anymore. She feels it is futile to argue. Which year do you live in, nineteen twenty-two? A little more spite and she will throw them off her tail. Rooms, rooms of her own. Virginia, Jacob, James. Why so Western? Why the men? Shuck it off. Live, leechlike. Here, take this sentence. A snake, a mongoose and a peacock. Happy? All true, even if it makes you laugh. She is covering up for covering up. One morning a baby monkey had tugged her shoelaces at the bus stop. She spoke to it calmly, it went away.

The house was open to the rain. No one thought of covering the stairs. The house saw a bent back moving backwards down the stairs, rag slowly moving. The house was a man standing at the top of the stairs, confusing morning for night. Eunuchs against the glass. Slippery yellow edible root. The house was new when they moved in. Limewashed walls shedding gently. It was better than the one before but worse than the next. Last riot, they burned it down.

Where

Behind the breeze the bonfire blazed. No time for tongue-twisters.

Grandfathers have a way of finding where the fish-shops are, even in a strange town, crossing fields, asking strangers, returning triumphant, the fish oil wobbling separately in a little plastic pouch.

Grandmothers have a way of knowing you are awake, of cooking strange flowers.

On no particular day, a line of vultures arrived to sit on the compound wall. Smokie was a band we listened to. All was not unbeautiful.

What

Miss Popular in a homemade frock. Clingfilming, jaywalking. So what if the ringers aren’t dead! Small meridian, the put-put-puttering squeal. Hail, tempo. Squeeze elbow knee and back into elbow back and knee. Not fit for goats. Last time she rode a rodeo was in a tea-truck. Try to imagine you are a picked, curled, fried and fermented leaf. Ignominious patri. Bookworm, fattening slowly, thickening out the world. The mut-mut-muttering formula that sees her through another test. Star pupil in the teacher’s eye. Fall, wish, shoot. These are the ways a girl survives. Nun in a dun sari. Grotto, gay. Carry in a sealed envelope the weal of trust. Amaretto, acerbic. Call nobody home. The tempo, the Matador. Skin a rotten place to hide in. A fist in the breast from a passing cyclist. Scar from the too-tight tie-ups. Lipserving, daydreaming.

What saved her?

When

Your sky travels towards me

I have been trying to outrun it, shifting location rapidly, bell-tower, syringe, locomotive, landfill, a vanished Syrian Christian eatery, Lebanon, cedar pencils, sackfuls of rice. Sometimes I trip in my eagerness to get away, Salamun, Sam Pitroda, sapodilla. If I travel fast enough from the detectives, savage, to the amulet, unread, I might have time to catch the next and the next, Hadron Collider, Right to Education, gas leak, hung parliament, sabotage, the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Jia Zhang-Ke, exactly my age, not a wrinkle or a grey hair, says: I feel time is a tragic thing. I feel it too, compatriot, smoke rising in the public bath. In a Brooklyn flat a Chinese-American poet puts her baby to sleep. The Chinatown bus to Boston might take me far enough, to clam chowder, mussels steamed in milk. Oh but this is slowing me down, I can feel again the taste of it, this lingering will not do. I have been trying to translate two words for a month now, drunken god, Shiva’s Stupor, should I say blue-god, or just say Krishna, how will I ever get across the story of the snake goddess in the chamber of the new bride? Meanwhile, the clouds are coming, they have the same shape, texture, colour, terror is a cumulus, run.

When the landmass broke away from what would be India and travelled toward what would become Madagascar the small blind snakes went along.

That is the only explanation.

Tim Wright

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Tim Wright lives in Melbourne in a house backing onto a train line. The poems for this issue were written in the south west of Western Australia and are part of a longer series.

From a tank of water to a cup of coffee. ‘Mistral duet’ (toaster). Panasonic. A group called Save Our Suburbs: ‘I think we need to work to address the main concerns.’ An elderly couple at the door with copies of Watchtower, husband and wife, more or less out for a chat. Do I believe that science and the Bible are compatible? The different light of a Saturday. Phana-sonic? Turn the radio down too low to understand.

Nationalism is always bubbling away somewhere. That which is of academic interest. Acts of language. Electronic grizzle, ‘dubby’. Increasing the value of the easily available. Apparently what it’s all about. Black pencil. Turn on water and wonder. Printed out poems now Things to Do lists. Inside a house in Australia, learning the language of France. Cough with confidence and continue speaking. Cracking cans on the porch. Those interesting times of sobriety, like a metallic token collected in the tray of a machine. Stretch your legs.

Boxes in the landscape. The assumptions of architecture. A different beach. The longer a trend takes to reach one. The grimy inner city becomes an idea. Patterns of light through the curtains. The Bolaño effect. Packets of mud. The relatively recent feels distant, yesterday six months. Amnesty. Lines from The Simpsons. Flip book. Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg’. A Grammarian could be an alien. ‘I can’t even begin to think of that yet’. A missing bracket, bed made of earth.

~ ~ ~

Compression: the shape of an animal running. ‘My mind was elsewhere’. Some thing, with other things pressed into it. A warehouse. Crushed leaves and bad posture. Or reaching between leaves to take something back. Respiration: an engine turning over. Next door, not communicated. A temporary cenotaph. I had never seen a swarm of bees before, pouring into itself like that. And the sky incites an exclamation. Browsing as methodology. Cable car.

Toxic green. The sense of expectation, when walking very early in the morning, that one is always just about to encounter a body. Inhale through a turbine. A senile blue. The dream washes over the framework. Bend over backwards. Catch the train somewhere new. A place one was once questioned. Heavy ankle length skirt. Manufactured reply. Dessicated branch, place it in the freezer. Dramatic postcard. Not the work but what the work implies.

Bust wrapped in cellophane; diaphanous transcript. Are we becoming a nation of wimps? A jug of beer carried carefully across a room. Luminous sweepings, staple remover. Drumming on gathered materials. A casual eclipse, seen from behind. Opinion columnist; common irritant. Chain of Ponds Road, western New South Wales. Let the nostalgia run its course. ‘Chromatose’. Having driven through applause. A book, a beam. A drinking song, not easily brushed off. Walking on forest floor. Rushed through a hospital. Darkish glint.

Geoff Page

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.

The Class

After forty years of fiction, he dreams he’s in a class again, back at the beginning. The tutor doesn‘t show herself, as is the way with dreams. All of them must read a story, a classic that they’ve loved for years: Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Frank O’Connor, Alice Munro. They read them carefully and well, one by one, and then as if at her instruction, and almost ceremonially, strip the words away like washing and throw them in a corner. The idea hangs there, newly naked, a yard or so above the desk they find they have in common. The dream goes on. He does not wake. It’s not quite his turn yet.

Alex Skovron

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and came to Australia aged nine. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Autographs (prose-poems, 2008), as well as a prose novella, The Poet (2005). Awards for his poetry include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and for his first book, The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His novella was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor. His New & Selected Poems is in preparation.

Citadel

Then one night the books ganged up on him. He was seated at his table in the studio-den, composing a cheque for the recent fence-repair, when an odd rapping, like muffled drummery behind his chair, a kind of tapping, caused him to cock his shoulder. The books were floating off the shelves to the floor, in random order; hundreds had already sorted themselves in steep spires. As he swivelled, stunned, watching the stacks grow higher, the bookcases empty, each steepening tower like a tottering sentry began to flow, a twitching perpendicular river, converging on his patch in the middle. There was no time to unravel the riddle – he was aghast, then horrified, distinctly, for the piles were merging. Some books had their heavy gilded spines towards him thickly, some their grinning edges – surging, swirling backbones bluntly fisted (convex or squared, many jacketed), or concave ledges viciously snapping, swaying as they listed; thousands of covers chaotically flapping, yet no chunk of any teetering creature (each mystically bracketed) likely to collapse. Cowering now, subsiding to the Persian rug, he saw the twisters lapse to a terminal dance, each obelisk in its terrible advance gave a kind of shrug, appeared to shudder forth and back, clearly readying for the final attack. Desperate by now that it must be a dream, he squeezed his eyes shut, breathed deep, then took a chance. Look! Bookcases crammed again, and quiet – no more savage parade! But flickering on the floor, its pages splayed, a single book.

Maria Takolander

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Maria Takolander’s poetry has been widely published. Her first book of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She was also winner of the inaugural Australian Book Review Short Story Prize in 2010, and has recently been awarded an Australia Council grant to develop a book of short stories, which will be published by Text. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.

Violence

The goat fished from the old wooden jetty. A hangover, he thought, was a state of mind, like the stench of the slimy pippies on the hook, the pull of the dirty tide on the line. He wiped the residue of the bait onto the tangled fur on his flank and picked up the thermos lid of coffee, cold as the dawn. The sea, he mused, always made him philosophical. A couple of pelicans had settled on the peeling roof of the only boat moored among the mangroves, tucking their beaks into the rancid feathers of their backs. From time to time the goat saw their eyes, rimmed like a drunk’s, move to watch him. It was no use; his bucket was empty. The fish, it seemed, had cleared out of this place. There were mud-crabs, exposed at low tide like rickety bones, and the usual detritus of birds. The landscape, though, had found a way into him. It was something his wife had never understood. Sitting in the deck chair, the goat rested the rod between his pressed legs and poured some more coffee. He heard the sound of the slick water on the hull of the broken-down boat, weighted by the pelicans. He swallowed some of the foul liquid and noted how the mangroves had spread. They were secretly closing the place in. A seagull flew down from the anonymous sky and landed on the boat’s stern. Its orange claws hooked the taffrail, and it began to vomit sound from its neck like something jagged and material. The goat pitched the fishing rod at the bird. The pole landed on the oily water like a praying mantis. The seagull stopped and looked at the goat. Then, with unblinking eyes, it took up the screeching again. The goat, casting his chair and thermos into the sea, began to bleat and bleat in return.

Beauty

She could not be said to think, but standing alone she was bothered by the vast movement and sound of the grass on the plains as the night bloodied the day. When the world yielded and was swallowed, she pressed herself to the hard dust, holed among the rocks with those of her skin and smell and hair and blood, and rubbed herself from fear in the hot place she knew until the wind swept through her. When she opened her eyes she was yet in the ravenous night, among the flesh and sounds of her kin, who were all given to the night within, and far from being riven by the thrill of the wind her body was quiet as a beast with its throat cut.

The day disturbed her with hunger like flint, so they trapped a young beast and held it down and razed its neck again and again until it bled and stopped moving. Her teeth were made for tearing. She took rest on the spoiled grass with the blood and flesh of the beast on her hands and tongue and on those to whose blood and flesh she belonged. There were the sky creatures, ragged as the carcass beneath their floating, and behind a strand of thirsty trees the sloping dogs. Then came the rustling night, always wanting more than the light, and as they fled through the gloaming plains it struck her that she was not afraid but whetted by its unending hunger.

Kate Waterhouse

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Kate Waterhouse is co-editor of Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986–2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). Until 2010, she lived in Sydney with her husband and three young daughters. She is currently living in Auckland, working on her accent and two poetry collections—one set in Australia and one in New Zealand, and on a second editing collaboration with Jennifer Harrison.

Cups (what is the sound of a mother breaking?)

all this mothering fills mine up but what about those whose cup got broken / no fault theirs / some damaged / father / mother / uncle / other trusted figure / institution (choose one) / cocking it up before the girl got her own shot at it / who comes in the night when she’s all done with pouring to lift the sob / howl from her throat / let it go like a wing and her baby with it / only a light space left / a feathered echo / where’s the compensation at 2am for theft of a good role model / who turns up in the place of a missing mother / grandmother / sister / functioning family unit / a class action’s clearly needed / think of the damages / diy security’s a difficult business / always demand outstripping supply / there you are carefully filling the cracks/papering over / three coats of the right paint / when the baby arrives in a jugful of milk and under that cup of yours there’s a dark pool and a suitcase waiting / my grandmother gave me a matching cup / saucer / plate set / fine bone china / she knew a thing or two before she laid all thirty of hers out on the stainless steel top / don’t cut on the bench / and fresh lamingtons waiting for the gang to come around before they went out on a boat long sunk / aunts and uncles ought not to fall out at times like that but grandma’s cup had a crack and some of my uncle was lost there in the first few flights of the mothering jug and it went the way of leftover milk at a tea party / I’d rather be the Queen of Hearts than Alice with a broken cup so next time you’re thinking / not thinking of her children / think of the cup and piss off to a cave / choose another portfolio / get some professional help / whatever / she’ll thank you for it

Iron Cove

After the drought, a week of rain and the ground gives up its water. Obviating sleep I run alone through deep pools that bathe the roots of trees. Cloud, close like smoke, amplifies the whine of a 747 hulk ghosting in over Callan Park. Here clouds of leaves lie down on the past but a flaked sign speaks: You are now entering the grounds of an acute psychiatric hospital. This morning troubling no one – runners, cyclists, dogs all absent. Around King George Oval tall turpentines incline towards the north, the queue of planes immune to rain, lantana prettily strangling the undergrowth. Past Leichardt pool where the track breaks out to open ground a Noisy Miner hunches disconsolate in the casuarinas – a grove of them that twins this cove of idle fishing boats to a small Italian town; the rowing club locked, skiffs pulled out like prosthetic limbs, the persistence of water. Red-eyed, a gang of crows shadow a magpie chick abandoned by the path; anxiety, such a human concept, as in: the magpie waited anxiously while the crow looped across the grass sours the world that is, festers in what’s to come. My feet skim sunken ground, overhead another jet engine grinds through the rain, that crushes us with love.

Nicholas YB Wong

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Nicholas YB Wong is the author of Cities of Sameness (Desperanto, 2012). His poems are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The Journal, Mead, Nano Fiction, Platte Valley Review, The Portland Review, Quiddity and REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters. He reads poetry for Drunken Boat. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com.

Journey

“Monogamous. I’m interested in monogamous.”

— Anne Carson

She pulls the seat belt across her breasts to reach the buckle, a schist in femininity. She looks away. Other cars are arranged in the parking lot neatly like urns. Soon, doors will open, hand-breaks released, people busy getting in and out. She envies those clean and metallic bodies, where a scratch can be covered up by paint. In a car’s life, scars never last long. He turns on the air conditioning, her hands fold on her laps to stop the chill entering her from below the dress. Their car moves, they don’t – first to the bakery, then her office and his. The tires, monogamous to this route, deserve a merit certificate. But when they are about to join the traffic outside, she looks into the rear mirror and finds herself, years younger, in the back seat, where they first made out, where they both thought such desire could last for however long they wanted, where they found nothing in life was monotonous.

Paranormal Panorama

Galicians are proud of their potatoes and watercress; mangosteens and mangoes bear heritage only linguistically. A sheen of shame blows in when the Thai family arrives at the infinity pool with in-room bathrobes and noise. The father nears the sundeck chair whose whole existence is to serve sweaty human bodies. His white sideburns say he is a guru who bareback-rides elephants to his sumptuous poppy fields. His six-year-old bomb-dives, causing ripples that make the water’s face look aged. The mother and daughter are acting maternal at the far end, splashing water onto each other like giant frogs in swamps, ready to lay eggs that look like sago in coconut tapioca. A deserted swing in Argentina sways by itself for ten days, a new tourist attraction. A shark with a snake’s body and toothed gills is found in Japanese waters after earthquakes. More absurd is me closing a book, looking at how they merge joy with travelling. A swimming pool cliché: the father counts from three, his children kicks with skills learned and not learned, departing from the edge of infinity toward me. The clouds are doing their job by hiding the sun, blurbs on the book jacket greased and glazed by tanning oil. This is what the website promised: our resort staff clears floating leaves eight times a day with an extended net, even no one swims there with laughter.

Ivy Alvarez

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). A recipient of writing residencies from MacDowell Colony (USA), Hawthornden Castle (UK), and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), her work is published in journals and anthologies in many countries and online, with individual poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. www.ivyalvarez.com.

The secret sister

She appeared in the meadow, two hours after dawn, nightgown fluttering in her wake as the sun gilded the hills, the mist rose pale blue, a scentless smoke. Where she stood, she was a column of white and she herself pale, lips bluing, too, hair a black waterfall. Turning to look at her, the cold grabbed at the skin of my belly, my calves. In a minute, she was younger by a year. You could see it, like taking a watch pin between finger and thumb, and winding it backwards. Shrinking into her clothes, hair rising, skin tightening, smoothing, plumping up, chest-height, waist-height, knee-height, the reeds teasing me with glimpses of her. Then she was a Moses in her swaddling clothes, then the smallest embryo, then a stain. She did not have a name.

The Museum of Inexplicable History

For six months I arranged museum dioramas; in placards explained the scenes; led bewildered tourists through small rooms. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings, ebony mocha okay choking down coffees, teas, distant gazes. Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday, cradled like a silkworm, suspended, watching the scene below. The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, green trousers and purple velour sleeves. Queered courtiers, courtesans, slippered feet denting stone steps. When Alice steals away and consoles the Duchess’s baby, it metamorphoses into a pig and runs away from her, runs away. As I would, if I could remember. I do remember. That I, just ten, became the mystery of course, reverse, twitch, emerge. In the distance, a chiming swish of chintz, of pastel polyester: the Avon Lady treks door to door. Pinkness announces itself, calm and self-important. People are sharks, while all the wild protected liminal woods hoist their nets, weighing the harvest. Rough chaff husks falling, blowing away. Something offensive: a revolver is cooked into a codex. I read it closely. It’s January: time to go.

Misbah Khokhar

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Misbah Khokhar was born in Karachi-Pakistan, with both European and Indian ancestry. She currently lives in Melbourne. She holds a Masters in Philosophy in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. Her work appears in Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and Peril. She has been featured on ABC Radio’s Poetica, and has performed at the Queensland Poetry Festival. She was highly commended by Thomas Shapcott, Brownyn Lea and John Kinsella, and mentioned as a ‘standout’ in Lea’s essay ‘Australian Poetry Now’ (Poetry Magazine, May 2016, Ed. Robert Adamson). Her debut collection Rooftops in Karachi is published with Vagabond deciBels3.

Rooftops in Karachi

My cousin has named all of his homing pigeons. He takes them in his soft hands and feeds them, but I have a feeling he could just as easily use those hands to snap their thin necks. My other cousin, who lives in the same house, goes around shooting cats. Since I arrived I have been putting out bowls of milk each night. Another cousin has an imaginary lover who she has introduced me to. She makes him out to be so real that I believe he is. But I can never seem to see him, which is not due to him being imaginary, but because he is shy and agile. She describes the way he kisses her, and the conversations they have, and to this day I remember his name. I know it’s been said that falconers feel their hearts soar with their falcons, but I don’t think it’s just a feeling.

I’m Going to Give You a Photograph

And when I take the photograph you will be saved. From what I don’t know. I’ve given you a photograph where you can store your grief: let it leave your face, ignite and fade. I’ve given you a photograph, your spectral resin will have no copies. It will be your canoptic surface, a scale of the immensity of your beauty. The flash will burn away your fate, will make you momentarily famous. I will give you a photograph that will be your golden fleece, a replica that answers you in time with a little betrayal.

Adam Aitken

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Adam Aitken’s fourth major book is Eighth Habitation. In 2010 he was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i Manoa. His work has appeared in The Australian’s Review of Books, Southerly, Heat, Poetry (Chicago), Jacket, Cha, and Drunken Boat. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Imperial Days

‘ a sort of

irksome Larkin-land’

– Pam Brown

My father’s imperial days, he remembers those, the better hours. To be born British. How coloured/ful was that? Spring 1961, a run on galoshes. Naipaul’s grumpy prose: and there is only one course: flight. Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness. Wot, Balham? Let us say that he’s forgotten the episode with the sleeping pills. I am glad my mother was no Sylvia Plath. He forgot the presents and gifts not reciprocated (a pair of black French knickers). He can’t recall the affairs and counter affairs, the improbable survival of beauty, art, the house which leaked and the stink of my sour nappies. The boredom of housebound employment and unemployment. My mother reminds me. The well-wishers arriving, drenched at the door during a bus strike. Her favourite story: an Australian novelist who couldn’t light the boiler in a miners strike. Stuffed it with too much newspaper she said. I’ve read about the white-out of 1963, the killer fog of ’64. My father’s letters and nightmares of the dead and the imminence of mutually assured destruction. The scarce tropical flowers and fresh fruit. The deadliness of the chill and the butcher’s queue for the last pot roast. I remember the sawdust on the floor. She remembers the drunken au pair with the French lover. Or was it the French au pair with the drunk lover? The cardigan poets who ate her out of house and home. The unending party. My father dreamt of a pottery in Wales. My mother refused. The boredom of 65, the plaster-eating mould. The summer of love, they missed it.

Brendan Ryan

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Brendan Ryan has had three collections of poetry published, the most recent being A Tight Circle, Whitmore Press, in 2008. His next collection of poetry, Travelling Through the Family, will be published by Hunter Publishers in 2012.

The killing work

The Hereford steer from wild country that charged our Valiant as we tried to shift it into a fresh paddock. Herd leader, cantankerous, fearless; a beast we couldn’t trust. Dents in the quarter panels, tongue swipes on the bumper. Pushed deeper into the paddock, we reverse away from the lowered horns, my father swearing, wrenching the steering wheel left, right, wheels skidding over cape weed. My brother and I in the back seat look away from what we know is not quite right. Not a time to speak with a beast on the loose, tearing through a barbed wire fence, flipping over, an apparent heart attack. We stare at the frothing mouth. My father silenced. The Hereford steer from wild country left on the track for the knackery truck.

scrubbed concrete floors
latex gloves, Muslim slaughtermen
rows of carcasses slide towards you

Returning from away, I ask about our pet cow Beefy – a cross-bred black dairy cow. The only cow we could hug, nuzzle, who would amble up to us, raise her head to sniff, rub against us. Not a productive milker, the type of cow who recognizes her own presence, unafraid of dogs, almost personable. You’re eating her, came the reply. Cut down, packed into plastic bags, steaks and ribs piled high in the Deep Freeze. A family has to eat. We ate steaks for breakfast, dinner and tea yet rarely butchered our own. Deaths in the paddock were acceptable, regrettable, something to rise from while talking around the red laminex table, those heifers that need to be ear-tagged.

Jen Crawford

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Jen Crawford is a New Zealander living in Singapore. Her poetry collections include Bad Appendix (Titus Books), Napoleon Swings (Soapbox Press) and most recently, Pop Riveter, a set of factory poems available in limited edition from Pania Press. She teaches creative writing at Nanyang Technological University.

clear days giant sacra

this is for. it is not about or to, but I wish it was with. or it is with, about, for, to. it will be with. it will be with. it is not it is with.

with a walking, a donkey alongside. the gravel releases dust and the dust takes up the sun, dumping it across the valley. it is now 22 degrees and 6pm. the decline is fitted with small mauve wildflowers. we can look at them fined in the light and dark, narrow for pleasure. with that I have an excellent headache, from the tightening of the sun’s plates against the hills. while the dog and the donkey chase each other through the discards we stand here cantering our trebuchets, in arms. there’s nowhere to set the baby down. when I had this pain before I didn’t consider my hip considering a weight. when I saw the gravel I didn’t know you would be with me, to hold and cantering.

it will be. a strong lower back and rain or light as circular breathing. it will be with me your cream-covered book. a mouth full of simple exercises in shaded awnings. let no more than a lungful. need it be one after another, in and out, left and right? only without clarinets, and so far these continue, in will be with me. I am still walking. at times it has been said that the problem is exacerbated by the fact that even dictating physicians frequently have difficulty with plurals and that this pushes the burden straight back on the transcriptionist. but this is a curfew from when. in will be with me it will be with me, this alongside and with pains. this in between fingers and around fingers, the gravel light. this donkey I am conscious, and child.

Julie Chevalier

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Julie Chevalier’s short-story collection, Permission to Lie, was published by Spineless Wonders in 2011. Two poetry collections are forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann: linen tough as history, and Darger: his girls.

haunted girl lines my pocket with headlines

girl sends me off forever but to sing     novena sends me girl    sends me off forever      girl
sends me to hospital girl reveals the clinic           girl sends me spelling            didn’t send the
question       girls sends off clouds from the window    sends me off forever the ward where I
was washing a girl        but washing the floor          wanted girl sends me a blossom on a lunch
tray     girl sends dead bouquet in the rubbish    a pissing patient girl gave newspapers send
me off girls     forever sang about girl    forever off girls but    moving girls send girls away
forever snow didn’t girl didn’t     sends me axe to shave      stopped        broke the food trolley
coming        girl sends me off

& dribbled catsup on his clean shirt april 12, 1972

as soon as mr darger left for mass          yeah, four times a day           i sneaked into his room & grabbed the clothes off
his chair        really hot water & extra scoops of lux    out of the bendix & pegged to the line       david suggested the
goofy old coot take a bath no siree    we brazillians don’t like to bathe in winter    april 12, hardly    of course
he’s not brazillian    i ironed the clothes dry while he was in the tub the old man grimaced when we yelled
surprise happy birthday       just us lodgers & the landlords       in the yard    he bent down to pick up a rusty bottle
cap & could hardly stand up again        leaned on a chair & stared at the clouds       he fed hot dog sandwiches to the
landlord’s dog         the only thing he said was the good lord always claps thunder on my birthday i wouldn’t say
grateful for the angel cake, no       three pieces       my seven minute icing      the new tube pan didn’t stick      the dog
followed him halfway up the stairs to his room

Bella Li

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Bella Li is a Melbourne poet and editor. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Meanjin, Cordite and Otoliths.

Voyage

Sullen days. The corsair moves mechanically on its hinges. Beneath our proscenium arch, wily ports ply their trade; measuring out the hours in skeletons and lampshades. The hold littered with props. Flat clouds drifting idly along the cardboard coast. (In the dawn they emerge, pale with grief.) I cannot remember biding time in the shallows with the air so steep. And the space behind the sun growing and growing, the stalls silent and empty on quiet nights. There were months when great shadows fell across the waves. And we moved, so it seemed, through lost oceans; past sunken islands from which the sounds of mourning stole. It is true that the flight was exhausting; my eyes reeked of distance. But when the blackness lifted, the horizon—beyond the dim circle of lights—remained featureless, unaltered. Now the shapes of our desires do not change but mimic, with each curtain fall, the appearance of a predictable set of stars. When evening transpires (at the appointed time, in the appointed place), the tide reverses; our loyal machines rise, assemble themselves across the deck. Wolf-like, sand-like. Waiting for that same, slow mirage: the familiar moon, hung from its lamprey sky. Swinging guilt.

E 44 10 N 33 15

In the year of the Hegira 622, driven from the city and exiled, I arrived at the mountains of the . The journey was arduous. But I was “armed with the terrors of the sword”. And the movement of the heavenly bodies (the western side of the city entirely round) filled the sky. The city was entirely round; the inhabitants remarkable for their treachery. Concerning the treacherous mountains. Concerning the origin of the name “ ” (in the palace, there was a small ). Here the young prince—concealing his deformity with a veil—saw in the heavens the terrible rising. And “the phantom drew back his veil”. Massacred, according to custom, the vast number of the inhabitants. There followed “a grievous famine”. (In the eastern sky I saw the sun.) One morning, according to the vast number of oriental historians, the sun “a little after rising, completely lost its light”. To the great astonishment of the astronomers, this darkness (in the eastern palace persisting). Persisted until noon.

Michael Farrell

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Michael Farrell has previously published prose poems in a raiders guide (Giramondo 2008). He coedited (with Jill Jones) Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann 2009). His latest publication is thempark (Book Thug 2010). Contact: limecha@hotmail.com.

Contretemps

Red wine is certifiably itchy trying to get Linda to splash Sally . When Sally walks in wearing Brad ’s shirt – the one with the heather on it . What isn ’ t a contretemps with those people ? It wasn ’ t my fault I buried the drugs , Sally said , wilting the lettuce with hot oil , Appalachian style . Glenda managed to join the tennis club , only to find that Tony had left , and had taken up croquet – or crochet – or Pinochet – or Pinocchio – or pinochle – or pineapple mastication for his health . Linda blamed everyone . Did you see Hal collapse at the piano , with one of those pussy willow rib – ticklers on ? How much irony did you put in that drink ? he gasped . I am going to get me a slice of Brad ’ s heather shirt — you see if I don ’ t ! A dog is here , with a message for the cows . . . ‘ Drop dead ’ , I think he said , and when Angelo turned up shirtless on his motorbike . . . People started doing a bit of algebra in their front mashed potato ( it was Halloween , after all ) . ( Teenagers panting under the eaves and all that . ) They’ve got Supertramp playing on the green this year ; I don ’ t know what respectable folkies see in ‘ \ ’ ‘ / ’ them myself . They ’ re no Yoko Onos are they ? Angelo turned the heat up by taking a hacksaw to the last baguette – as if there aren ’ t kids to foster in his own village – or whatever they have up in those rainbows he lives in . The bridge fell on Hal ’ s house last night , but no one believed him so his grandmother was stuck there half the night , with a girder holding her scalp in place : you could say . But how the bridge got there is anyone ’ s business .

Kirby Wright

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Wright has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, The Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, his first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards. Wright is also the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii and lectured with poet Gary Snyder. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency in Edgartown, Mass., and also the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic.

Song for the Joy Luck Club Waitress of Kowloon Tong

“Sihk faahn,” you giggled, serving shrimp dim sum with congee porridge. In the restaurant you read my fortune: “Yat geuk dap leung syun,” then scrawled name and email on a paper napkin.

You live off Festival Walk on the 60^th floor with your parents. “Lang do pow kang,” boasted your mother. We sit on a bench beside the light rail track. Smog unfurls over the mountain like a bone-white flag as your shiny black hair rivers through me. \ Lips taste of peanuts from dragon beard candy. I summon the boy in me hidden for decades. “Ngoh oi nei,” I stammer. Your eyes say you don’t believe.

I search for our future as my train passes.

Notes:

sihk faahn: bon appetit

yat geuk dap leung syun: 1 foot on 2 boats (beware of cheating in a relationship)

lang do pow kang: so pretty the mirror breaks

ngoh oi neih: I love you

Sound Effects in Vista

Boom-ah-boom-ah-boom-boom. The walls and tables quiver. The F-18s are at it again, practice bombing the Whiskey and Zulu regions of neighboring Camp Pendleton. They carpet bomb while I’m stretched out on the carpet. Fluffy the cat folds her ears, scrambles for cover. They bomb through Letterman’s monologue—I pretend the jerk next door is banging his drums. The windows rattle like hippie tambourines. Newborn hawks in the Torrey Pine scream at the planets and stars.

Jill Jones

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Jill Jones has published six full-length books of poetry, including Dark Bright Doors, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize. She co-edited, with Michael Farrell,Out Of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. She is a member of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.

Not Far

Is he gauging the distance between the station and the rain, or is it just another exchange? Like the packets these clouds will drop, but not here. I’m just as distant when he goes off smoking. Is there nothing left? Some of us manage to talk but not touch, speaking to air in all the common folly and gist inside us while a cop car circles the block. Whoever believes they’ll find what they’re looking for and how little it matters? Just as someone moves the hands of the clock and wishes maps were bigger. He’s back again, stabbing the phone, edgy keys in pocket. Each time gets more icy. I don’t imagine what he’s saying, please believe me, where’s the money, can’t come.

My excuses are extracted from this body by invisible operations of time that’s been bent, lungs and knapsacks, shallow breathing, all that dumb effort, just to go home again, and too much fun. I haven’t noticed the stones for days and leaves have got dirtier. Still, I never throw anything on the tracks or have crossed. I’m more careful than a tree even in winter, in places I can’t go outside of a time I only imagine but often recall. As so much exists to imagine. And so much gone, only a quarter forgotten. But we speak into the havens, lines of communiqué, blocks with holes. As we express little grunts, packages from the breast, gulping like winners but also spent, as we imagined it, bright and clear, but not far, not that far.

Another Mystery

It’s dawn and you still can’t get across. There’s a rowboat on the lake under moonlight. Behind you is a house full of suspects. Fate and the hangman are making arrangements. It’s good to have company and childish desires. The rain harbours feelings in the nervy night. I’m watching the incriminating clock. Who’s capable of love while we’re looking for motives? I’m guilty telling the truth, it’s what I know.

What’s this coldness? What are these shawls? There are too many men in hats, while we’re blaming ourselves, seeing what we’re not supposed to know, or swallowing pills. Animals are without cash flows or alibis. Birds rise into the light, while you play with money you don’t have, floating another prospectus from the wharf. All the little girls are grown-ups. What has been overlooked? A strange kind of parsimony, “Set your children free!”

Ivy Ireland

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Ivy Ireland is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant, and PhD candidate. Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.

L’escale Restaurant, Greenwich, CT

and it’s not like you have some other place to be. tea, open fire place, open fire on some other space for avoidance. it’s not like you are this ashes urn, portable picnic for later holocausts. or this charred log. you aren’t even the small burning before the final ash out. most other people come here to support themselves in whatever horror seems most appropriate in whichever day dream. of theirs. this day. why not you. this time. possibly they realise you won’t tip well even though lord knows desmond tutu ate here just last week. exclusivity should equal your absence. it’s not as though anyone can shape this differently to how they were born to shape it. there are no other tools, no contrasting fashions, no further instructions. what does equality really signify in any case. an afternoon of missing your morning of the subsequent day means little here. sunlight so new and distant, almost reaching the sand inlet before these clouds join forces to obfuscate it out.

The Gaps

The text has holes in it, little keyholes for the sake of myth-making, and only the one star-gazing out can (im)possibly slip into them. There is a crucial adjustment when “how can I exist?” turns into “how can I be alive in this?” Suddenly those roundabout machines we built to keep ourselves way out of critical theory converge in the centre, provoking and awakening an idea of onwards-and-upwards. This sensation is momentary.

Even if I say to you “you are this if this is life” it won’t matter and we will continue into cake at 3pm, our bodies refusing forever. Even if I sew in to my own skin the text: I do not require anything to continue this remaining, the stitches will only remain until they don’t anymore. And we’ll need them to stay there forever.

To perform becomes the central verb. Like the encroaching of the sea, we now perform this abeyance as though this temporary pause to consider could be stitched into skin, as though that very same skin could push its way through all the gaps the text could (im)possibly hold. As though, at the end, that same stinking vellum could be stretched over contingency like a disappearance-blanket. As though we could then hide away under it, remain in this word: love.

Suneeta Peres da Costa

Written by mascara on April 15, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Suneeta Peres da Costa is an award-winning writer whose work includes the bestselling novel Homework (Bloomsbury), stories, essays, and poems in local and international journals and anthologies, as well as numerous productions for ABC Radio. The pieces that appear here are taken from a collection of short, experimental fiction. She currently lives in Sydney.

The Changed Woman

Had she changed, she wondered? For though there were some visible signs of her transformation what was difficult was that the more significant changes had happened inside her and therefore could not really be seen at all. Often she tried to remember and make the gestures of her old self, and while this might have reassured the others, she herself knew this old self was merely a sheath, an elaborate and outmoded disguise. When she discarded it, however, it seemed these people, much beloved by her, could not recognise her and spoke disapprovingly of her new ways. Despite her efforts to win them over, they were unwilling, or else incapable, of understanding her. They went about their lives, faithful to their old habits, while she grew restive and weary of it all, dreaming of circuses and caravans and distant lands. Eventually she devised an escape plan. The heartbreaking thing was she could not say goodbye for if she so much as looked into the eyes of these familiar people, now virtual strangers, she was sure her resolve to leave would itself break forever. So on the appointed day, she rose at dawn, placed a few possessions—heirlooms and relics as she already considered them—in a bag and made her way to the end of the valley and up through the mountain pass. The sky changed, the vegetation changed, but somehow, despite the heavy cloak she wore for protection from the elements, she felt a sure-footed lightheartedness.

The Mirror Man

Was shy, retiring, but his problem was he shone and gave a bad impression despite his every effort to go unremarked. He would try to be still, so as not to upset the careful geometry of others’ existences, but if he was knocked by the smallest force—a gust of wind, say, or a loud noise—he shimmered and glowed and peopled shouted and raised their fists at him. He would have liked to disappear, and yet he was everywhere, or so it seemed, reverberating and reflecting. At other times he would have liked to speak, to recite a poem, whistle, or even sing, but he was alas imprisoned by an intractable muteness. On certain moonlit evenings, if he became tangentially aware of what it might be to know another, to identify, it nevertheless remained a kind of abstract knowledge, unable to be put to good use. The birds would descend from the trees, catching the coquettish reflections of their bright wings in his silvery glass and then fly up to the sky away from him. No one actually touched him, though beautiful women spoke through him, as though to an ancient oracle, of such things as their longings and dreams. Occasionally, overhearing the cries of neighbourhood children, he was so lonely, so envious of their games and easy camaraderie, the Mirror Man would hope that their ball might crash though and even shatter him—as often happened to a local window.

Brenda Saunders

Written by mascara on April 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Brenda Saunders is a Sydney writer and artist of Aboriginal and British descent. She has had work published on the web and in literary journals in Australia and overseas. Her poetry readings have been broadcast on Awaye and Poetica ABCRN. Brenda won the Banjo Patterson Poetry Prize in 2010 and was recently short-listed for the David Unaipon Prize in the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.

Fashion statement

I’m a One-off. A Pin-up at the high end of haute. My elan gathers the adventuous, adjusts the unpredictable: that je ne sais quoi! I’m quality svelte, hot off the press. Shaped and swathed, I thread my way with seamless artistry, purring down the catwalk of history. Of course I’m biased! If cut on the cross, I’m bound to unravel. At times I’m taken down a size, let down, stitched up. Still I hold it all together. When pinched and tucked I suffer pins and needles. End up a caste-off on the cutting room floor. Destined for the rack, I’d rather be hung with Armani (He says in five languages how froufrou is my frisson, how chic my couture) than pegged as synthetic Esprit. It’s not that I’ve got tickets on myself, but Label is everything. I could be sized up for Ready to Wear. Phased out in Ping Pong After 8. Still, better a Country Road in beige, than one-size-fits-all in the bargain basement.

Uneasy virtues

Regrets

I find them here at the door, scraping like the cat wanting to get out at night: coming in wild-eyed with a new smell. I can usually brush them aside with those cobwebs in the hall. Leave them under the dusty mat. At the hairdressers regret is everywhere. Before the mirror I sit captive to loss. And they creep up unannounced at someone’s funeral: hit you front on so you’re out of breath. But what can you do? Peggy Lee drowned them in ‘Coffee and cigarettes‛ but that never does it for me. Indecision is a maze leading nowhere; second thoughts are a dead end. Do nothing and regret takes hold. Who needs yesterday’s burden to slow you down? Look ahead. After all the grass is always greener… so they say. Possibilities are said to be limitless.

Patience

Patience is said to be a virtue. But is it always necessary or beneficial? I have neighbours who must have endless patience. They wait until I come home to play their heavy metal collection. In this case impatience can be a positive for change. Just look at queues. People will get in line for anything. In the city they block streets, hold up pedestrians, waiting for a Ready-Teller: sit in cars for hours as the traffic crawls along. (Now who’s ‘moving in the fast lane?) In the 21^st century we live in the moment. The ‘imp’ of impatience is like a Fury on speed. Still, if I’m out of range I know there’s no need to react. The touch of a key will send my on-line thoughts flying around the world.

Jaimie Gusman

Written by mascara on April 5, 2012. Posted in Poetry.

Jaimie Gusman lives in Honolulu where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaii, teaches creative writing and composition, and runs the M.I.A. Art & Literary Series (http://miahonolulu.wordpress.com/). Her work has been published nationally and internationally by Unshod Quills, Hearing Voices, Hawaii Women’s Journal, Tinfish Press, Spork Press, Shampoo, Anderbo, Juked, Barnwood, DIAGRAM, Dark Sky Magazine, 2 River Review, The Dirty Napkin Review, and others. She has a chapbook coming out from Tinfish Press, as well as a chapbook coming out from Highway 101 press this year.

Everything is For Seen

Perhaps I will jump from the roof she says. I imagine she won’t go and even if she does she can’t break like the precious bowls like the ceramic platters on our heads. No one wants me as in desires me goes fang-thirsty to the hole in the ground. She removes her dress. Look at me. Look at my scars. I am not worship not even a moment of it. I bend down so that heels are under thighs and I get close to her feet. She wiggles her toes arches her masses with tongue-strength with the energy of wood. I am her bale of rope I am what she will go on hanging herself with. Get up she says get close to my mouth. I can smell her throat but I am not sure how I know this how I know anything about her body. Put your head between my teeth she says and I do like this when I get inside the throat stench becomes stronger like cow stomach like goat brain like the desire of it. Do you see them she asks. I see six eggs pale as soap little cracks in their shells red rivers she said these are the blood lines and I need them out (with tears I think) please would you like to hold one would you like to go to the roof and have a throw

Education

Master is a silly word because what it means is that there are two. One is the master and one is not. This is the first lesson the Shekhinah tells us. We are told and we are given quizzes on this idea, which we fill out by coloring inside the lines of a bubble and when we fail with the idea we are to take the quizzes again. I raise my hand and say I am a student. She looks at me for the first time I am wise and I know this as a student should always be of an owl’s mind. I think this and she beats her chest and growls as a beast of the wood. I cannot see her eyes as they are not broken but sealed. She has been standing upright since she arrived and now she gets down to her knees and digs them into the ground which is not soft as it is from pebble and sand. Beneath her is the pool of blood which she bends down to and cups in her hands. I’m sorry she says again and again and she tells us to cup our hands too so that she might pour herself into our palms

Fatima Bhutto

Written by mascara on January 2, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul in 1982. Her father Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan’s former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics. She is the author of two books: Whispers of the Desert, a volume of poetry, which was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press, Pakistan when Fatima was 15 years old. 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, was published by OUP in 2006. Her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published around the world in 2010. Fatima wrote a weekly column for Jang – Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper and its English sister publication The News – for two years. She covered the Israeli Invasion and war with Lebanon from Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and also reported from Iran in January 2007 and Cuba in April 2008. Fatima’s work has appeared in the New Statesman, Daily Beast, Guardian, and The Caravan Magazine. Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published by Jonathan Cape in Australia this spring.

Photograph: Benjamin Loyseau

Karachi air
Breathed in through the lungs
Is sickly sweet
Like honeycomb left out to rot
In the warm, unrepentant heat.
Or else,
It is thick, smoky
Like mesquite
The evening scent of garbarge burning
At the first break of dusk’s early light.
Mynah birds and ravens caw
A jealous chord
Singing to the street.
At midnight
I can hear the poor sweeper man
Sweep sweeping
The moonlit littered roads.
I sleep in bed
Covered in a sheet of sweat.
There is no electricity now
In this deadened August night

I trawl
Middle Eastern airlines, terminals and luggage belts
Stuck alongside students,
Honeymooners in black robes and white thobes
And slave labour, working through the night.
Hiding my name on my boarding passes,
A thumb obscuring the sight of letters, destinations and foreign nights
And inventing new fictions,
Identities
And family trees.
My legs are close to clotting
And my bags unnecessarily heavy.
Qatar, Etihad and Emirates
I count them off as lovers
I use in desperate times of need.,
Flying out every month
Pretending that I’m free,
Subsisting on airline meals.

Parting from Karachi
At departure gates
And onwards worldwide.
I wish it well
My love unkind.
Good riddance,
Farewell.
Memories are dulled as the pilot starts the plane
Nostalgia side swept as stewardesses buckle belts and enquire about meal time.
Nauseated
Goodbye.
From above,
Even our city’s lights
Look bright.
Even the noisy traffic
Seems mild,
The congestion meek,
The airwaves clear.
From the sky,
From a passenger plane,
Filled with labourers
Dressed in January sandals
And drinking whisky
They’d never get otherwise,
Neat
And singing ghazals
To lull them to sleep,
This mangled city,
This wretched, wretched home
Loses so much heart.
But,
Three days later
My chest hurts for a sound
Of something familiar
An exhaust broken on a motorcycle.
The smell of the salty, smoky air.
The taste off a broken beetel nut
I’d never eat at home
And I imagine
It’s worth
Love
Some of the time.

He moved my body
continents,
Pressing gently
On the underside of my knee.
It was winter
When he sold me,
Seventy five degrees
I sleep on tarmacs
Eyes half closed.
I have become an exile
With an open home.
My valise holds all my shirts
And coats
I’m packed for winter
Wearing summer clothes.
I left behind a country once,
I can’t remember when.

Underneath it all
I’m bare boned
Afraid
Very simply alone.
On white ironed sheets
I wait,
Cold.
A knock on the ceiling
A boot against the floor
Sticky remote control at the foot of the bed
I cower
Concierge
Bellhop
Fire escapes winding under my window
And an alarm reminds me
I ordered room service way too long ago.

In nine years
I hardly wrote a red line
The crawl inside me subsided.
In the car,
Sunday, past noon,
The freeway pulled me down
And drudged up my lines.
I spoke for him,
For his embrace,
Coated with warm sweat
In a parking lot,
For the kiss,
And the scrape of his beard
As I breathed him in
One more hurried time.
So, I wrote him these lines,
Meaningless,
But mine
I go,
Leaving him,
My only memories
Inside a kiss,
Held in by his lips
In a claustrophobic garage
In which our farewells were disguised.

Cyril Wong

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Cyril Wong won the Singapore Literature Prize for his fourth collection of poetry, unmarked treasure (firstfruits, 2004) and his fifth collection, like a seed with its singular purpose (firstfruits, 2006), was launched in Singapore. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum and online at The Cortland Review and Cordite. His books are available online at http://www.firstfruitspublications.com

Night Bus

Awake, I strike a word against the dark
like a match. This could be the past
we are leaving. Buses on high beams;

wild eyes that ride down the road’s
unpromising narrative. The sky at a loss
for stars, thick as a foreign tongue.

Shadows bleed and every tree, thought
or breath is black. God is here
and not here, his retreat or restraint

everywhere around us, filling us
like cooling lead. Between nowhere
and everywhere, this is no hegira.

Where do we end up but at another
interchange? Sobering light gives us
pause, night pooling into memory.

The future takes its time to get here.

The Promise

The morning drizzle
fails to perform

its threat of a downpour;
the sun only returns,

blunted, flexing its light
for the long haul.

You said we’d make love
upon waking−

some appointments
are still kept,

the future made real
by the promises we fulfil.

Otherwise, maps
lose their meaning−

the school you were told
would be there

has become a reservoir.
All I know about me

is what I once promised
myself, and you,

to believe.
And when everything fails,

there is always that song
on the radio, news

of something heroic,
another long walk

in the park, another cigarette,
a sudden prayer.

Mirror

           The portrait you see remains unfinished.       The mirror pounces like a single headlight.
       Eyes deduce what its glass mouth devours.       Some days you come back a distorted echo.
            But no artist may ever know you better.    But no artist may ever know you better.
     Some days you come back a distorted echo.    Eyes deduce what its glass mouth devours.
      The mirror pounces like a single headlight. The portrait you see remains unfinished.

The Apples

The apples wait in a bowl. Pick one.
The apples tug at the hem of my hunger − the love of apples.
The apples appear in a poem about a bowl of apples.
The apples are as serene as monks.
The apples cannot know the colour of the bowl they are in.
The apples in the poem are not edible. Neither is the bowl.
The apples fight for my attention. In fact, this happens very slowly.
The apples revel in their nudity and know nothing about sin.
The apples genuinely believe they are the original fruit.
The apples sometimes wish they were more than themselves.
The apples have heard of apples larger than themselves.
The apples deny any relationship to pears.
The apples wonder if it is true, that green apples exist.
The apples riot in the dark, but they cannot win. Still, they try.
The apples are a reminder that time is never still.
The apples fear what awaits them after they have been eaten.
The apples would like to be reborn with legs.
The apples are too restless to meditate.
The apples were communist, but they soon converted to capitalism.
The apples knock each other off the top of the bowl − the politics of apples.
The apples curse quietly when one of them is chosen.
The apples dream of orchards, the generosity of rain and sunlight.
The apples remember suspension, gravity, then falling −
The apples mourn when none of them is chosen.
The apples concede to my teeth, filling my mouth with their insides.
The apples, unlike us, would prefer time to hurry.
The apples at the bottom admire the apples at the top.
The apples wait to steal my life and turn it into an apple.
The apples cannot think beyond the bowl's bright rim, the open window.
The apples are still waiting.

Mark O’Flynn

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Mark O’Flynn has published two collections of poems The Too Bright Sun, and The Good Oil with Five Islands Press. A third is forthcoming in 2007. Eleanor & Eve, his seventh play, was produced at Railway Street Theatre in Sydney in 2003. His novel, Grassdogs, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife, two children and one dog.

Japanese Student

[Language is the house of being – Heidegger]

In the house of doing
the origami crane
or is it a seagull

becomes the residue
which we praise to the limits
of our clumsy grammar.

Pause to collect
all our thoughts about cranes.

We mime abstractions
and screwy semantics,
a tiny trout in its beak.

A paper crane is a door
that stays open too long
on a lake of amputated reflections.

The phrase book a tennis ball between us.

Hilarity is the difference
between pig and fig.
We are learning much.

What she thinks
is etched on her face
like an atrocity,
a sundered morpheme.

Fear has no gender
but its bare bones
and the inability to speak.

We make cruel signs of soothing.

In the house of bumbling
the syllables of my cooking
are the unspoken stuff of nightmares.

Her attitude to lizards tells us apart.

We swap no worries, and good tucker
and konichiwa but this is not enough.
In silence we cannot be silent.

Tears have no culture
beyond the distance
of a loveless boy

with a trout for a heart
who does not understand
the word kindness.

Language is mute
in the house of drowning
where she is lowered into the water

bonsai sprouting in her mouth

tongue’s words pecked
alive from her gills
by an origami crane.

Toh Hsien Min

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Hsien Min Toh has published two collections of poetry, Iambus (1994) and The Enclosure of Love (2001). His work has also been published in periodicals such as Acumen, Atlanta Review, the London Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is also the founding editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (www.qlrs.com).

Snake Wine

Not until my second last morning did I break
beyond Pasteur Street to Ben Thanh market,
whose exterior did not hint at the dimensions
of its accepting harvests, and the way I got there
was by braving the Saigon traffic on a pillion seat,
darting in between and around swarms of scooters
and taxis trying to make it through the same junctions
all together, while the wind of my helpless movement
blew the scent of the woman in front of me,
with tickling wisps of her hair, at me; but this is not
about her, or how she would start with lightly humoured
petulance whenever I strode into her room. Rather,
after twenty minutes of flicking our fingers through
handmade chopsticks with accompanying ivory rests
and miniature dolls selling the fantasy of a Vietnam
subtly curved in áo dài, we came across rows and rows
of violin-case-shaped bottles filled with yellow wine
and a baby king cobra each, glassy eyed, stiff-tongued,
fangs visible as with intent, its patterned grey hood
enriched by a deep orange dot of Chinese wolfsberry.
I wondered if this could be an appropriate gift for you;
you hatched in the Year of the Snake, and you had the bite
of a woman. We assume these coils are dead,
but I remembered the news report on the Thai bachelor
who had uncorked a bottle only for the cobra
to spring out from organic hibernation to bury those fangs
deep into his knuckles, and I thought that you would
surely never taste the liquor if I told you that story,
which would mean it could rest on your bedside ledge
as a permanently dreamcatching souvenir of me.

Lemons

When life gives me lemons, I make lemonade.
As a boy, I detested the taste of lemons,
that sharp sourness captured in a grimace,
but recently I have had so much citrus fruit
that I’ve adjusted to the attack of the acid.
The other day I found myself biting into
lemon wedges for the juice, as though
they were orange slices. It made me think
how during our university days we bought
bags of lemons from Sainsbury’s because
they were cheap. I squeezed yellow halves
till my hands tingled for an hour, while you
turned a heap of sugar into syrup. No matter
what we felt about that white snowdrift of guilt,
we knew through trying that there was a point
at which a virtuous loss of sweetness
turned to an uncomfortable biting of tongues,
and if we were to let doubt cool all morning
in the fridge we would have the poor choice
of hot syrup or watering down painfully
squeezed lemonade. We hadn’t learnt, though,
that the same applies to unheaped denials,
that belief sustains the unspoken like a wound,
and that even if the nice thing about lemons
is that unlike blood oranges they don’t stain
no matter how careless you are with them,
their invisible ink shows when you try
suspected surfaces with heat. I suppose
you can’t compare lemons and oranges,
but if you know the only red nettings to end up
in my fruit compartment hold Valencia oranges,
you’ll understand my surprise, with the wedges,
to have discovered aftertaste, the lingering
in the mouth of a peculiarly silky sweetness
that is inestimable relief after the assault.

Trench Digging

When our boots hit the beach at Punggol, it was two to a trench
for all except the sick list, but then there was a command post
to be dug in, and so it was like coming on to score an own-goal
when one was supposed to have been on the bench,
because it seemed the sick list could come in handy.
All day we chipped at the sand. Letting our pride sting us
into motion, ten of us yoked our bad backs and asthma attacks
to the land. “C’mon there, give us a hand,” we poked out
at the drivers, more from the duty of making their lazy cigarettes
carry an incremental tithe in guilt, as the leftenants were away
poring over their maps, in the shade of a tembusu tree.
Oh, yes, 2LT Lee came around every now and then,
fresh as a temperate daisy, to show us how we could dig
faster than we could, but when his walkie-talkie charged the air
with static it seemed he had to be elsewhere. It was still us,
after all, who chopped the beach with changkuls, filled
three thousand sandbags, clanged iron pickets into resisting sand
with the monkey ram as though we were ringing the time,
and lined the walls with corrugated iron sheets to hold out
the slow, treacherous crumble. An hour after dusk, the final
sandbag in place, we squinted at the low prow and the crossbeams
of what we had built, and wished that we could shoot at it.
Then the leftenants moved in. Set up their signal sets
and the portable radio receiving 98.7FM. As for us,
we moped about the tonners, between the chilly night
and the stifle under canvas, the pebbles and the deep blue sea.
It seems the CO came round and was rather pleased.
One month on, our leftenants wore fresh bars on their epaulettes.
We knew what we had done, and though we didn’t care
about the trench I didn’t dare say that was good enough,
and what anger this could rouse would not be scattered
like phosphorous-tipped bullets into the invading sea.

Keri Glastonbury

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Keri Glastonbury is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She completed a Doctorate in Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney, in 2005. Her thesis, titled ‘Shut up nobody wants to hear your poems!’, staged a friendly title bout between painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen, two male grunge auteurs of her generation. She has published two books of poetry, Hygienic Lily (Five Islands Press, 1999) and super-regional (Vagabond, 2001) and has an unpublished manuscript ‘Grit Salute’ (2004). She is an editor of the small publishing company, Local Consumption Publications (www.localconsumption.com) who are this year releasing the title Strawberry Hills Forever by Vanessa Berry.

hygenic italy

‘but are you social nexus or cultural interstice?
that’s the type of question the tour guides
won’t answer’

Ted Nielsen, ‘Pax Romana’. ( effusive:

you’d like to be differently enculturated, though in the end
there’s a charm in being in relation to yourself, irrespective
like age, that won’t excuse anyone—& yet, tonight
you fell in love with her impeccable rendition of rebellion
so braced, like a sleek carriage with a hybrid accent
acquired abroad. you, all the while, way too verbal
is it really freeform? even the american was grounded, smoothly
modulated, listening to your mental garbage cleansing—as the
roman sky turned cobalt blue against the mustard church
you’re surrounded by new exteriors & too many saints
as suddenly all your tropes seem so maligned—being gentle with
yourself to coax the high down
what a lot of english you can sprout
( hygienic italy:

pigeons and satellite dishes occupy the event horizon
across vast condominium rooftops
perhaps fluttering anti-angels leave the basilica
for the smashed terracotta hill of testaccio
or form emergent, from the grunge and gravitas
but are they, even ala
laurie anderson, luce iragary, jorie graham
your ideal intermediatries?
at a point where art & money cleave together
or apart, a plaque on the wall tries to unite
in new ideas and faith in talent
heralding all our smug alterities (eg: poems)
a situated intelligence
which leaves you to gesticulate on the streets
the mastery of repeating language acquisition
something else you always yawned at, until now
a sonorous cipher, you wish—along with a fiat cinque cento
for hooting around

( bella figura:

the driver in pigtails and furs tries ardently
to elicit more than physiognomy’s silent science
the movement of the car naturalising the city streets
to a point of cathexis that never arrives
trouncing your fledgling accretion process
your fringe mown in an attempt at suburban sharp
& more like, a member of hush. you sense
you’re surrounded by voracious readers & translators
not afraid to overshoot the mark.. so, it’s preferable
to internal monologues, or the self-deprecations
of the ‘performative’ you’re used to

or cowering in the face of the high femme
once summer breaks out the mini-skirts
followed by a joke about trains full
of perfumed boys playing pocket billiards
( 3rd rate hotel:

a sandy rain, born devotional
roughs a sirocco sky like stone wash
while you’re breaking the settee
of arts council fantasy you believe it
when she says rome’s been spoilt
post the 60s but let’s not get glib
there’s always memory studies
and expatriate experts even angels
have right wings as if a counter-reformation
on traffic infringements might start
a spate of double-parking in perth
her sister-in-law as howler monkey
so it bothers us, like passive smoking
the botticelli’s so blanchett
& woo, i’m feeling so bohemian like you
( justified & ancient:

a slumped angel
           headstone and gramsci’s grave
find you among the conifers
           & a posthumous library
weighted by voluminous spines
     & a short shelf-life
           a shift to the affective level
getting your attention
           like heavy handed art house

reading old books
           has you surprised to learn
the dog ‘shat’ in the tucker box

though for the most part
           you remain disengaged as a cabby
on imperial administrative interests
           driving home the episteme
                       ( carravagio:

a rapid summer downpour, street’s full of motorini
horns and sirens, while you’re buffeted along
plateau upon plateau—jargon relative
as rabbiting on, whatever else concomitant with that
one day molar, next molecular—illuminated manuscript
or subcontracted signwriter, THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT
in 500 point georgia bold—a question of flow
god is a vector monster, remaining beneath, above
& within the product—or just shot through
your spiritual highs make you reach for the love addiction guide
as you will the lines closer together, into a thrumming scaffolding
no grumpy bastard could use to translate or reproduce
later, rain sprinkling in through the roof’s natural shower rose
wandering home from the family palazzo, the etonian accent
of the prince roller-skating round the ballroom
the squeamish pope in red ‘too real’—& st john the baptist
in nomenclature only, a wry tuft of adolescent pubic hair
soft, as upholstered walls in genovese velvets
( brava:

infused by gradients of atmosphere, as the city’s spring
makes the laundromat cheery and deferred purchasing
limns the shopfronts, a threshold away from murano glass
and your exquisite ambivalence. the street’s pock marks
the pique arousals. poor pride, as well as prada
street vendors assuming you’re nordic, demure, pure
& full of forgetting in the self-image quiz show
things just playing out, remnants of the
feminine, adjusting your antenna—to appreciate
bras and leather goods in the windows
wondrously—& no magazines have colonised
the space you are in. you won’t enter the stores
and cultural discretion will thrive on these glimpses
the body there, but you’re not in the driver’s seat
perhaps you thought it was the passenger side

Cath Vidler

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Cath Vidler edits Snorkel (http://www.snorkel.org.au) a literary magazine specialising in creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders. Her poems have most recently appeared in Turbine, Trout, Otoliths and Nthposition. Her first chapbook, Cloud Theory, is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (http://www.puncherandwattmann.com).

Five Collaborations with the Google Poetry Robot

1. It’s late

It’s late. I buy DIY bonsai potato home shrines. I wish to see The World on the Internet. I might Cheat if the original painting is not framed by titles like Falcon 4 etc. My favorite food is still more secure than Windows! I hope to spend 2 nights at the Apple Store online or at any site based on Xoops 1. I dream that one day all volcanoes on Earth are shrunk to epigrams that inspire wonder and provoke a buildup of Alternatives.

2. The first person.

The first person is a relative of mine. I think this is FUNNY. My mom Calls me Brenna but my friend Leonard has recently quit using names because he thinks they are flimsy firewalls.

3. Lists.

Lists. I work at Burger King Corporation. Bill Gates was Once Arrested for switching Policies on the Use of Knowledge. I love my Mac because when I’m hungry it says Here you Are and gives me a Link to a story about a Different Kind of Blue. Menus. You never get tired of reading Commercialized Lists. I like to eat ‘Cultured’ items but Vows to stop rubbish-dumping at Multistorey buildings are exempt from nutrition.

4. See you later Alligator

See you later Alligator. It’s still too early to commit. My cat is going into Opposition because many districts base their curriculum on areas of Special Expertise. I hope you have time to Think ahead. My favorite Word often changes depending on current errors. Adios. I enjoy Flying low over farmland in South Georgia and its associated Enterprises in India including Sinde. I learn Greek phrases and indications of Geographical origin. Thank you again for having me in your Language.

5. Winter in my Garden

Winter in my Garden is asleep and twitching softly. I saw deserted trenches and the difficult Path. I want One Of Those Days when the blank page fills up with Boeing and applicable privacy Laws are better defined. Why do I Have to make my avatar look like the second most Popular recipe from kelloggs? I never Promised to fix the roof while there’s a galaxy to grow. I might See the Boom shadow falling on the Cedars.

Charles D’Anastasi

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Born in Malta, emigrated to Australia at fifteen, Charles D’Anastasi has had poems published in various publications, anthologies, and on line poetry journals including malleable jangle, wandering dog(UK), Going Down Swinging, and Divan. In 2006 The Melbourne Poets Union published his chapbook The unreliable harbour (Union Poets Series).

the man in pierre bonnard’s ‘the open window’

he comes home after the monochrome of another day to believe in bonnard’s ‘the open window’ the room vermillion splashed rouged heads straight for the open window stretches a hand in the cool air reaches for the stillness of the trees he comes home to a system of beauty considers himself gripped by the bay in the sky he comes home to the open window some kind of moment quiverings scheming in his head he comes home convinced this is not only bonnard’s room rubs his face in the burning walls he comes home all things midnight a much descended staircase he comes home to the windowsill works the slowness of the hour almost invisible half-man half-bird knows it’s there doesn’t know how it stirs just feels it like the fire in his throat he comes home to the open arms of the window the smell of pine inhales the moment flies past the comfort of the window’s ledge

Agnes Vong

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Agnes Vong Lai Ieng is a postgraduate student at the University of Macau, currently completing a thesis on Macao poetry. In 2006 Vong had three original poems (as well as some translations) in The Drunken Boat’s Chinese supplement. Vong was the assistant editor and a contributing poet for The University of Macau Poets’ Jubilee Anthology and a translator for a selection of Yao Feng’s poems in his recently published Faraway Song. She has just finished a collaborative project with Christopher Kelen on translations, variations and responses to the poetry of Xin Qiji. The resulting book, Spring Wind Brings the Fireworks – is in press with VAC in Chicago and expected to appear in the coming months. Vong’s own book of Macao poems is currently in preparation.

ying yang hotel

a mixture of water and milk
so the Chinese say

it sprang from a fragrant, milky bath
a white towel wrapped her black body
heat sucked up the water
sweating, gasping

a local paper, with compliments
women from afar
in red and black
smiled sweetly at his Rolex

under the blazing sun
half-naked men covered in mud
scaling bamboo, to and fro
sweating, gasping
falling

lover of fairy tales

evening light
a valley of shadows

secrets between my footsteps and
the tangled bushes

a twig from the first branch
for the ash girl

a red apple
for the snowy white girl

a magic door
for the nosy girl

at the end of the valley
my grandmother’s grave

the composer

incense for Buddha
the only order in this pig sty

drink makes blur of reality
sickness of the heart

light burns brighter
the mountain turning grey

my final symphony
a prayer

my orchestra
carried away by a sparrow

and delivered to Buddha
burning incense for me

Libby Hart

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Libby Hart was a recipient of a D J O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne in 2003. Her suite of poems, Fresh News from the Arctic won the Somerset National Poetry Prize in 2005. Her first collection of poetry, also titled Fresh News from the Arctic, was published in 2006 by Interactive Press and has just won The Ann Elder Award for poetry.

Light

I see you there, standing in only your legs
and a cloak as dark as winter night;
your one eye gleaming, as if a glass eye.

And true, it is glass. Yes, it be.
For my doctor, with hands dipped by chemical
performs a magic before me.

In focus, I gather its light
and dare not move.
I feel the weight of feathers.

It’s the fallen bird that keeps me grounded
to this chair and to this room.
To the very stillness of things.

Note: This poem was written in response to Hugh Welch Diamond’s
photograph, ‘Seated woman with bird’ (c.1855). Diamond was one of the
earliest photographers. A doctor by profession, he decided to specialise
in the treatment of the mentally ill and was appointed to the Surrey
County Lunatic Asylum where he produced numerous photographs of his
patients. Diamond believed that photography could assist in the
treatment of mental disorders.

Your Body Bare

‘According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or
seven souls. The souls [are] scattered throughout the body.’
− Annie Dillard

Hold your many souls like a juggler, this is Inuit land.
The chest and arms, all Inuit-souled.
Even the eyes have two souled-suns that burn a gleam
through a viewer’s head.

This is the breadth of your many engines:
a hand, a moon-shaped sigh
a cheekbone, rare
a glimpse of finger.
The turning of the body
in graceful-gracelessness.

You are like a horizon
bending and shaping itself at will −
a balloon of escape,
a lung of tree.
The form of things to come.

Flux

Nightfall comes hesitating with light.
It reaches out in short, sharp Morse Code.
Indecipherably lingering, and then it leaves.
All I have are three letters: I.O.U.
Then it’s gone like the wind that’s forgotten its anchor.

Sleepless Dreaming

Curled and weighted like an anchor
you’re as heavy as sympathy
and as warm as December.

Waves roll in from the half-opened door.

David Gilbey

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

David Gilbey is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Charles Sturt University. He is editor of 4W literary journal. Born in London, he migrated to Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney. Involved with a variety of arts groups in the community, he has been known to tread the boards and impersonate well-known public figures. His reviews have been published in Australian Book Review. His first part collection of poetry is Under the Rainbow, FourW press, 1996. He has just completed the manuscript for his first full collection, having travelled to US, UK, France, Japan and China on Study Leave 2006. In 2007 he is teaching English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan. David is married to general practitioner Dr Geraldine Duncan and they have four children quickly exiting adolescence.

Pegasus
for Lifen

Outside the Quan Jude Roast Duck Restaurant
a candyman glassblower makes animals, figurines,
from caramelized sugar, smiling at his skill:
brittle brown prawn skins, antennae, mouth and legs,
shining exoskeletons of dog, balloon man, and, for us,
a horse –
distending a head from the soft globe,
pinching a mouth, ears,
stretching a billowing tail
from the soft, streaked sugar sheen
hardening as he works it.

Somehow there is movement in the twist of neck
and leaping haunch, though in what we call reality
impossibly dwarfed back legs could only hobble.
A mystical beast for all that, a windrider
to carry us off to our dining palace
along the freezing street.

In the restaurant I say I’ve brought my horse,
tried to park it outside – couldn’t find the rail.
Luckily the waiter’s Chinese
and doesn’t understand my cowboy joke
but grinned just the same.

David Wood

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

David Wood is a writer and musician living at Springbrook in the Gold Coast Hinterland. His writing includes poetry, novels and, more recently, an extended philosophical treatise, Plato’s Cave which draws upon scientific, philosophical and mystical insights. David has recently built an octagonal sandstone dome in which he lives and writes. He has been Principal Piccolist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and has contributed to many publications including The Canberra Times and The Courier-Mail. David has been a guest writer at the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

Butterflies

Two butterflies
are flying through the orchard,
making love in flight.

I would not have thought
it possible – but there they are,
look,
joined bodies
crisscrossing the budding
branches of the fruit trees
where the wind
has caught your skirt,
lifting it into the air
like butterfly wings.

Who taught you to kiss
like that?

I am coming down the
track between the trees
to the brown dam,
to the grasses
heavy-headed with
spring.

And the day
opens like a palm,
a pianist’s hand
I reach up to and
hold and gently
draw down towards me
into the grasses,
the fruit trees
sweet as the
nectar on your lips
when I taste you

Morning

You woke and turned, your head upon the pillow
sculpted in a silvered cave of air,
naked, lying by the open window,
stars rampant in the tangle of your hair.

Last night we slept upon the drifting waters;
the moon sang like an entering lover
secret songs that lovers’ lips might whisper,
hair falling through the moonlight like a star.

A kiss to brush your eyes into the sunlight,
to gentle you from sleep, a lullaby
of hearts so close that sing upon the waters,
flowers in the iris of an eye.

Kylie Rose

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Kylie Rose is currently studying creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Her suite of poems, Doll Songs was commended in the 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize and she received second place for her poem Shark Egg in the 2006 Roland Robinson Literary Awards. She lives with her four children in Maitland.

West Annex
Celestial Warehouse
Temple of Heaven

I always see a woman in the moon.
Concubine of solar congress,
frail geisha
undressed in the dark.

I never knew the moon was a man
until I found the closet
where he keeps
his sleeping tablets.

God of Nocturnal Brightness,
you fill and fail,
obedient to the seminal
will of the sun.

You will never look the same.

Summer Palace

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Afternoon is an oyster,
caesarean opened,
pearly lake and sky
adhered to the luminous womb.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Men smoke, giving breath
to marble dragons. They fish
the ox-bronze sky with kites
on rod and reel.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Pleasure boats skim the peach
lake, hulls a flurry of bat
wings that fracture
my reflection.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
I watch willows
defer to the mottled
milk of evening’s dawn.
Their branches lip the sun.

Seventeen Arches Bridge
divides this watery
day like a woman’s mineral
wrist escaping a heavy,
silver sleeve.

Forbidden City

Suited street vendors converge on the bus
carcass of maggot-white spenders.
Welcome swallows and willows
skim the moat like nimble tongues
affixed to no mouth.

The South Gate parts her lips
and admits me into her
illicit stone pipe.
Toward the secret lacquered chambers,
I tread the golden stones.

Women are still locked
up in palanquins and camphor coffers.
They chant
in empty chambers,
let me out.

Ross Donlon

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Ross Donlon lives in Castlemaine, Victoria. His first collection Tightrope Horizon was published by Five Islands Press in 2003

Black Swans

Swans go about in pairs,
she says.
They mate for life.
She spied them from the house they leased
to sort out their marriage.
She sees them splash inside the reedy wetland
in overlapping circles.
They flurry and call as they bow to feed,
never far from one another.

Later he sees them flying
through the scarlet sun,
steel necks straight against the sky,
wings punching,
bodies packed like jets,
their trajectory flat
like a fresh line drawn on a map.

Adam Aitken

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Adam Aitken is the author of four collections of poetry and a new book is forthcoming from Giramondo Publishing next year. He is currently living in Cambodia. (Photo by Juno Gemes)

Fin de Siècle

Between two climates she’d be waiting, the slender young émigré
so dark and delicate the wind passed right through her,
always there before you, the bright architect of love
who knew her way around the café chairs, the Latin lovers.
How she’d inspired that horizon, the penthouse, the tower.
Greek, French, Ukrainian, all of the above? No-one knew for sure
what drove her south one winter, a whim or a storm?
Her age or why she had promised to see you again,
or why she always promised, sighing, mood wracked,
hat wide-brimmed with daisies and gliding towards you
through the fun palace colonnades before sunset – no one knew
why she always promised to be there
under the whitewash crumbling that left its stain
on your waiter’s apron and in your hair, as if you had emerged
unscathed from its collapse, the blast driving you back,
grasping your last tip.
She would arrive after work (though no-one knew what she did),
complement your menu, then a final swim
before the chill shadows enclosed the beach.
Statues murmured in the dusky shadows, mascara dusk
and in the golden bracelet of a rockpool children sparkled
among their castles, before they flooded at high tide.
Were they her children? If so they could never be too careful
building their moats, before she moved to a bench in the sun.
The Latin lovers waved and she didn’t wave back.
She was the pleasure of the world passing, about to shake
her wings free of the disaster, and take off, and leave you
once again thinking this had been the best century ever
and you were haunted by what she could not forget,
already beyond your knowing, what she is and was.

Fable

That year they rode low in the water
on ballast of oaths and convicted emotions

moved on to springtime ports
past the Pig and Sows reef
and the ridiculously expensive prison
lost steerage in a lull of unconcern
and absent-minded fishing.

In those days an invasion
was a kind of plague jellyfish,
laid back remorae, or cold front
that blew in early, unseasonal.
Everyone was hitching rides.
When someone entered
new seasons of exchange– fluids, fire,
language and metal–
someone else exited.
They were what they made, and what they couldn’t
someone else did.
Another’s lack seemed
no more than their own.
All land codified
as the visible
scoured and clearfelled,
the land
of the forever language.

At Rozelle Hospital

At Rozelle Hospital, his final destination
some quartermaster who’d cracked
drew
on a sandstone pier
a worldly fish, a navy frigate in its port,

a tropic bird of seed.
Full sails, great promise,
a kind of escape
from a madder Captain.

King’s botanist inside
who made the book for all
engraved, exotic
with his names – each new flower and tree

and new stiff Latin, the whole evolutionary kit,
the iron bars of genealogy.

Doctor, I ask you: what inky blot liberates
or draws together us
between the covers of hand-bound books
when you want your name
a legacy to crown the sky?

Fig trees, for instance, just
appear between the stones, green
as immigrants or refugees
hidden by the dark?

Are they natives now by instant decree?
You wear their leafy heads, and see
yourself once again,
historical footnote, crazed misfit

scattered, afraid, frozen
in unseasonal rain.
Or are we wasted now, due to
lack of name or use: seedy fruit
scattered in the grass,

imports that multiplied?
                    What of the bigger machines, like
                    destiny, meaning, sanity?
The fork and divergences
of who we want to be?
                   The rigging
on that ship
will catch the breeze,
then what?

Ionian

“are war and peace
playing their little game over your dead body?”
Jorie Graham

If, Eastern Asian time, you arrive
at the cove
to begin your holiday,
small figures camp in ruined hills,
waiting to advance.
Luckily we have
a Western point of view:
all timetables and maps: each hill,
the coordinates to fame
the minefield, the track
to that strategically useless
hilltop village, a tour guide,
and parking for buses.

Now, the snipers (retired codgers
your great-great grandpa couldn’t kill)
fish on the quiet beach, sipping
hot mint tea.
The winning cavalry
ride scabrous donkeys
and for a nominal sum
escort you through the ruins.

Tides regroup like armies
and the opalescent waters
whet your Byronic taste
for filigreed pistols, severed heads,
slavegirls, broken columns.

Filling the boats with trench-bootie:
proven property, like heritage,
gorgeous sunsets, or the exact
scent of victory –
too subtle for my words.

Judith Beveridge

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Judith Beveridge has published three books of poetry all of which have won major prizes: The Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lighting Press 1987); Accidental Grace, (UQP, 1996) and Wolf Notes (Giramondo Publishing, 2003). She is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. She currentlyteaches poetry at post-graduate level at the University of Sydney and at post-graduate and undergraduate level at the University of Newcastle. She has edited UQP’s The Best Australian Poetry 2006 as well as co-edited anthologies from the Newcastle Poetry Prize, Sunweight (2005) and The Honey Fills the Cone (2006).

The Book

There is a fish called flower of the wave
and a fish called the hardyhead. There is
the parrotfish, the pineapple fish, the boarfish
the bullhead shark. There’s the rough flute
mouth, the toothy flathead, the two spot
bristle tooth and the yellow sabretooth blenny.

At night I study. At night I learn sixty-two
types of wrasse. I learn there’s the glass fish,
the globe fish, the goat fish and an eastern
and southern gobble guts, both left-eyed
and right-eyed flounders, a rhinoceros
file fish, a racoon butterfly fish, a grub fish,

a tear-drop sleeper goby, a robust pygmy
star-gazer and a half and half puller. There’s
a fish called happy moments. But I haven’t
found it yet. I haven’t found the right one.
The name I can throw back at Davey when
in a voice flat as oil, he calls me: “sweetlips”.

Despite

Despite a headache, stationary all day, unable to decay;
despite these reels ticking again into the gradient

of each throb; my eyes feeling as fragile as snow-domes
in the hands of a fractious child; my head grading all

the grains of sand shunted southwards again by a week
of black katabatic winds; despite the yachts tinkling,

calling like knives on goblets for silence as the tide
dumps another load of kelp around my head – I feel

happy, calm; and for a moment I love the feel of hessian
weather on my arms and legs. I love being with Davey

who smells like an old fish trough, stubble on his chin
sharp as wrasse’s teeth. I love the lighthouse on the cliff-top

as it holds the stupefied position of a pocket chesspiece.
I know another distress flare might soon find its passage

through the nerves my head manipulates, that an onshore
of jagged air push isobars back; that lightning’s filamented

pulse rig more cordage for my head. I know the veins
in my head will tighten, distort, bend again like lines

trying to dislodge a snag, that nausea will head for a dry
berth in my throat – but now, I fix my bait, spit out my beer

as if it had become as tasteless as the brackish Baltic
and I reel my line in. I know the creels must come in despite

blood on the charts, the pounding of cruel encephalitic winds.
I drag the rod back, it arcs like a dolphin scudding on its tail,

and I’m happy, calm, fishing again here with Davey.
We’re almost doing the limbo bringing our lines in.

Todd Swift

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Todd Swift is one of the leading Canadian poets of his generation (those born since 1960), and his poetry was included in two recent major anthologies of Canadian verse, Open Field (Persea, 2005) and The New Canon (Vehicule, 2005). He is Oxfam GB Poet In Residence and editor of their best-selling poetry CD series, Life Lines and Life Lines 2. He is poetry editor for Nthposition online magazine. He lectures in creative writing and English at the graduate and undergraduate levels at Kingston University, and teaches at Birkbeck and The Poetry School, in London. He has edited many international anthologies, such as Short Fuse (Rattapallax, 2002) and 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, 2003). His own poetry has been published by DC Books in four collections, most recently Winter Tennis (2007). He is co-editor of the major new study of contemporary English Quebec poetry, Language Acts (Vehicule, 2007). His poems have appeared widely in such journals as Agenda, Cimarron Review, The Guardian, Jacket, London Magazine, The Manhattan Review, New American Writing, Poetry Review, and The Wolf. His reviews appear widely, in places such as Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, and Poetry London. He is doing his PhD at the University of East Anglia, where he also took his MA in Creative Writing.

English Words

Badge me and badger me,
Catch me and calliper my skull,
Suck out the phonemes, sip
The allomorphs. Automata, loci,
Imprudent, implants… put me on
Compound parade and glue
My ablative: stick a synthetical vowel
Up the lexical layer with a trowel
But build that system with interplay.

The Unidentified Man

So I went down to the fence where the jobs were,
Put my face against the wire, and yowled Hire me
To the boss-men whose job it was to hire two men,
When around me stood maybe two hundred men;

My hands gripped the wire, framing my yowling,
Too clean by half. I wanted to have something to do,
You see, in your world. The gates parted for no one
I knew. All I did was have a small way with words,

Of no use to the high chimneys that smoked above us,
To hang on the old tree where language yellowed.
Two men came and lugged me low, inside the gate,
Dropped my body in with the slow horses for meat.

Fado

To sing fado
is to open the barn door
before the horses.

Singing fado is to set water
spinning so it tires the storm.

Fado means teaching fire
to climb itself in flame, a rope.

Fado throws the wind away,
kisses the stars farewell
in night’s lost stairwell.

To sing fado
is knowing love’s torn dress
sold to sailors to buy
back your heart’s secret share.

Fado is leaving
nothing on your nakedness.

Fado is touch singing to skin.

Map Of Love

You are not on my map of love, you said
And I the cartographer of all things lived,

The device so curled and aged it had faded.
Sweep away those pins and flags, heart,

And come here to divide these spoils
On this bed where we surround and fall,

Fighting our way out of poppy fields
Consensual as battle, squabbling over power

Or Nepal. The answer is we’re artists or lovers
Pursuing night’s cherries in a spring campaign.

Ravi Shankar

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards and co-authored a chapbook with Reb Livingston, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books). His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Massachusetts Review, Fulcrum, McSweeney’s and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among many others. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has appeared as a commentator on NPR and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, is co-editing an anthology of contemporary South Asian, East Asian Poetry, due out with W.W.Norton & Co. in Spring 2008.

Indian Elephant

Under date palms and a towering gopuram
studded with carvings of deities in acrobatic
sexual congress, it’s almost easy to overlook

the dark, mustached mahout in khaki shorts
leaning against a crooked stick, murmuring
in Malayalam to the ornamented purveyor

of blessings beside him, bedecked in marigolds
spirals of white paint outlining wistful eyes
and plummeting down a trunk that swings

to pluck a rupee from the devout, to bless
the bent-headed. In one practiced motion,
the prodigiuos converted into the propitious.

Box Turtle

Jeweled egg in the middle of a twisting
path tamped down by footfall, darkened
in the shadow of tall pines, I pluck and put

it to my nose. Gradually, like arousal
rousing by degrees, a blunt head extends
from an uncircumcised prepuce to glare

red-eyed at how earth has been removed
from under it, how it flails three-toed
in space, until abruptly, a hinged plastron

snaps shut. Gathering itself in, domed shell
concentrically radiating orange and black
in a mantra: hermetic, tantric, self-reliant.

Jumbo Jet

Such scale manifest in juxtaposition:
like a pod of echolocating whales
fuselages roll, immense, silhouetted

on taxiway tarmac by blue edge lights
and halogen green center reflectors
to aprons serviced by motorised ramps,

fuel trucks, baggage carts, flag wavers,
all turning in synchronicity to words
emitted from the Sphinx-like control

tower. Approaching aircraft moving
from skies through its own length
so progressively, it appears to hover

Jill Jones

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Jill Jones’s latest books is Broken/Open (Salt, 2005), which was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year 2005, and three chapbooks: Fold Unfold (Vagabond, 2005). In 2003 her fourth book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems, won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. She has collaborated with photographer Annette Willis on a number of projects. She has been a film reviewer, journalist, book editor and arts administrator.

What Is This?

While we’re talking light passes, though it’s easy to ignore
its radiant shift. We’re neither passengers nor eternal,
though we trip on each other’s recall, there’s another history
being rearranged in shades drawn on ground.
I say, it’s how you think in circles, wanting to merge rather than mark.
(The four corners of a centre tremble as they touch space.)

Our argument may ignite small layers or return to its great elasticity,
it’s no more than extending a mirror into the existence of zero.
But I can do nothing unless I lose my own track in land that made the curve
neither fleeting nor continuing, but always shown on ground.

Here are the difficulties – of clusters, pebbles, mind moon, that great
vacant sign, an eternal jewel, the head’s empty bucket, containing
all things, yet without rearranging itself within clarity’s blue shadow.

The light of your fingers skin under sky.

– after Lightpool series, Salvatori Gerardi

Matching Colours In a Flame

Is it the way silence peels away the hours
or light inches too near to death?
(It gets closer to take hold of my hands)

I will not worry over the heat
but go out into the angle of a demand.

How a door shouts or afternoon is lacking
when meanings double and nights increase
or clouds break your face, imperfect and happy.

Bottlebrush

City birds are living on their coast
of roads and industrial cranking
among the blinking dive of motors.
It’s all leaky rather than transparent
like the earth hum’s low and constant herz.

An unknown screech comes
from middle distance
and means little from a window
even if you’re well.

There’s been turnover since the shooting
the café now sells furniture
and amongst papaya, cardboard boxes
limp greens on pallets, the pickings
are as daily as the leaded and diesel
descending those old forgotten miles
above. In the midst
here’s king pigeon, sparrows, starlings
the old world rubbish sticking
in the claw, buggy feathers and shit splat
dodging all the colour of skies.

And parrots hang from spring
when ancient honey
sings within a callistemon’s
brief and red hours.

Andrew Slattery

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Andrew Slattery is a Communications graduate from The University of Newcastle. His poems have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His awards include the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, the Roland Robinson Literary Award, and the Val Vallis Poetry Award. He lives in Berlin.

The River Winter

It’s no use counting water with time
if it’s going to freeze up every year,
solid from bank to bank, the river set

flush with the surrounding plains
of ground snow. And don’t rely on heat –
the sun is an alloy of silica and static blue.

Floating branches have stilled
and now shadow the surface
like the underveins of a cloud.

The river is an allegory, better than most –
universal and exacting; an ice-tray; die-cast
in element season; depth indeterminate.

A group of deer stroll across the river,
seeming not to raise their knees, but to skate
the surface, to maintain a share of weight.

The river turns like a worn claw.
The river is a box of jammed water;
neither flowing nor permanent.

The babydeer trips on a rift where a stream
moves contra to the main riverline;
where meltwater slows and forms along the pelt

of seamed ice. The deer holds to its hoary legs,
steadies the cardinal point of its mind and shifts
orderly across this neither land nor water.

Blackbirding

Before dawn, little girls play with knives,
walk over the grass still grey with damp
before a sun swells the ground and all

the living in it. Two girls out with paring knives,
at dawn – you’d think a play duel was afoot!
Every Saturday before breakfast, two girls out

with an undertaking to collect the dead,
or those close to it. After Dad sprayed
the night before. “Off me vines yer little bastards!”

He’d long-lobbied to kill them en masse.
“Bloody pests!” as he swivels his bald-mad eyes,
a persistent “pink pink pink…,” a thin “peeeeeeee”

and a low “tuc tuc tuc” send him running
down the grape rows with his rifle
shooting black rocks or any spot on his eye

that puts a blackbird in his mind. So most are dead
by dawn if the spray has got to their hearts.
The girls are civil mystics and farewell

the last star to blip off the sky.
Before dawn it’s as still as a seed;
everything sharp clicks the air. Like the snakes

which have been out all night, slimming along
the trellis channels under the vines, the girls
have exacted their process. They pick off

any beetles around wounds and openings,
lift off the wing bars, the upper-tail covers
and unclip the wishbone from their shoulders.

See the way the tendon lifts like a string
from the underside; the way their thumbs fit
neat in the cupola bone behind the eyes.

In winter, they hear the blackbirds
quietly “singing to themselves.”
This is their sub-song. They marvel

at tinybird architecture and how such quiet things
once made sky circles. The blackbird plays
a boxwood flute. When they find the air sac

it’s better than a boring chicken’s wishbone –
you can push the sac and see
if there’s any song left in it. The stitchbird’s

glomera bone brings luck in fives. They peel back
the duffled barbs, remove the pinions and fold
the wing back under the body, tie it with string

and clean their hands on the dewy watergrass.
They’re planning a whole day for the blacks
nested in the upland mangrove nooks

to listen for tacit coos in cavities and lowed stumps.
They imagine dismantling the head of an owl
and locating the hoots in its standing frame.

Or to the sea – the steep cliff sucks the grey sea
up against its chest, the young nested against the cliffs,
out of reach from the rats. For today, they are done,

they fondle the oddments deep in their pockets
and follow the horse-path home. At night they lie
on the blue grass. Around their ankles

are amulets made from birdfeet tied end to end,
scratching their skin “tuc tuc tuc.” If they hold
the tiny birdskulls up to any-shaped moon, look

through the eye sockets and there’s always
a round moon. The great distance between stars
contains the eye. They will grow up to farm the stars,

not in clean rows but thrown up like random seeds.
You can sharpen a tailbone to its quill-end
to draw a white bird on the night, or hold

longer wingbones up to the stars like a scaffolding
to the spotted flue; join them horizontal
as if collecting the universe in armature.

Yeow Kai Chai

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Yeow Kai Chai is the author of two poetry collections, Pretend I’m Not Here (2006) and Secret Manta (2001).He co-edits the online journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He is also the deputy editor of the arts and lifestyle section in Singapore’s The Straits Times, where he reviews music and writes pop-culture commentaries.

Red and Blue

The accessory, zipped up,
awaits the blink-off.

Redacted, this could
just end up one jet-lagged lyre.

Keep soul, big stuff in the overhead
administration, says trolley dolly.

Here is what is: a suspicious package
with attendant implications.

It’s none of my personal vertex,
but we’re psyched for another

sexy spin, another hook
to hang civilisation on, like Equator.

Beyond allotted legroom,
degree of reclination and those

damp hot towels, we rise
and fall, aside from such plenitude,

terminal or tarnation.
Gazing out this sentimental window

into pitch dark, yanking soul
out of you . . . to winnow these aisles

or suffuse every spore . . .
that’s what it should do, shouldn’t it?

If he can’t quite define it,
what hope the rest of us?

It isn’t the blue dress,
which doesn’t lie. It’s in the bag.

It is. Don’t get me wrong –
I like righteous peanuts and hot towels

that come all over my face,
the subject already taxiing

to a softly tick and what’s that slipping
from its side? A whiff? It’s time.

Hold that nip while the gentlest,
quietest one casually pulls a tiny red pin.

Quarterly Report No. 4: Pachinko Parlour Vending Machine
a reggaeton pantoum

Biorhythm pulsate baby crave
Slot plastic token slit
Pop David apple diorama
Tip on Renaissance palindrome

Slot Hoboken plastic slit
Karaoke queen light koan
Spit on Renaissance palindrome
Baby love caw macaw

Karaoke queen light kaftan
Secretary bird wind toy
Baby love paw macaque
Cool duck pop placebo

Secretary dirge toy boy
Work Geylang parlour breeze
Cool duck put Kanebo
Now perfect tongue service

Ice cream parlour breeze
Impostor take on hyperrealist
Now defect Foreign Service
Doppelganger slip crash mirror

Impostor take aurora borealis
Reverse phat spin lips
Doppelgänger slap dash traitor
Ream gleam soda fizz

Reverse fat pink slips
Drink up silver chalice
Ream gleam Lola fizz
Game for it kissogram

Drink up silly heiress
Pop Babel juicy melisma
Dame kiss o Gran
Biorhythm pulsate babbling slave

Gold In Them Trees

Gold my woebegone gill
In rays fill such lustrous haze
Them everything but these
Trees where no human will

Kate Vinen

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Kate Vinen is a writer and director whose most recent short film, ‘Rebecca’, is due for completion in 2007. She is also a singer/songwriter and poet. Her poem ‘The Last Swim of Summer’ was short listed for the 2006 Wet Ink Poetry Prize. Her biggest inspirations are wild places and wild men.

The Search Party

My mouth has been this dry before,
White lipped and deathly dry,
But from a different kind of walking
Where your body was the path
And your heart the destination.
If there was a way back
I would lose it to the land;
The crumbs of love
Are hiding under canopies
That never let the sunlight in.
Few words were exchanged
But so much was spoken;
One is a language to unlearn
That places the future in settings
Amongst alpine grasses
And flannel flowers.
Everything is hidden or exposed,
Nothing just is
And still they search for me;
Bush has been tracked
Riverbeds, dragged
For the body that never surfaces.
There is no one to blame now that
Mr. Sin is dead;
But she swears, sin never dies.
The sights he and I saw
Blur together
And the roads disappear.
I looked down from the peak
Of the mountain
To find more mountains
Below, and understood
My loss is everyone’s loss,
And on Waterfall Way
The granite outcrop
Hid our dealings from the day.
The feeling, I remember
Was all-encompassing
Between a rock and a hard place.
There is your blood.
There is my blood.
There is our blood together.

The Last Swim of Summer

Our first swim was the last swim of summer.
You said I needed boys that
Smelt like the sea;
Now that they are gone
And you are right
Memories lurk down by the wooden boats.
Things I didn’t know about;
I hate not knowing everything.
It is a reminder that the world exists without me,
That I am not a part of everything.
If only I had known then
You can only romanticise something when it’s gone,
Like some kind of consolation prize for your loss.
I will shut my eyes, open my legs
And view the world as I see it.
I find myself wishing there was only one place
I had ever known you
So I could destroy it.
There are too many places that have part of me.
We drove back the following night and you said
We had won
And I knew by you saying it that we hadn’t.

Lorraine Marwood

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Lorraine Marwood has three collections of poetry published with Five Islands Press- the first Skinprint in 1996 and the last two collections Redback Mansion 2002 and that downhill yelling 2005 both for children. Her first verse novel ratwhiskers and me will be published by Walker in 2008 and her latest book The girl who turned into treacle is an Aussie Nibbles with Penguin 2007. Lorraine loves taking poetry workshops with schools, writes techniques regularly for Literature Base, and has just returned from a month’s creative residency in Adelaide with the May Gibbs Literature Trust, to write a second verse novel. She lives in Central Victoria with her husband and most of her six children have now left home.

Colouring In

Stretched on the lounge room floor
I coloured overalled American farmers,
patches on their knees and holding pitchforks
(my dad never had these)
and fine feathered roosters,
(our chooks had no male company).

I coloured an old tractor,
a prancing horse and sunflowers
that nodded eyes and mouths
like farmer’s daughters all in a regular
healthy row.
We were farmer’s daughters
so I sketched in the flies
and the motes of chook dust,
even the rats that stole between the earthen
chook pen floors and the sacks of pellets
my father piggy-backed,
and wondered if ours could be called
a farm at all;
after all I’d coloured beyond
the mass-produced lines.

Saddlebags

The years have pouches,
saddlebags for camel skin.

I know this as the sepia sweep
from the photograph
helps me brush across my grandfather’s
chin, to pause beneath the sphinx shade
to reach my hand along desert lines,
sword cuts, crisscrossed railway
lines, meanderings and cul de sacs.

The prairie cheeks have harvest
stubble, rough and sharp as thistle
blades. My grandfather turns
his head, the deep shade makes
me tumble and I see the furrows
that his travelling years have made,
the quick shuffle between farmer
and soldier, the scramble for
a horizon, like riding the dawn beach
on his own farm horse
with the pebbles of men floating
out to sea. I try and climb
along that rough prairie plane,
try to climb for the eyes, but
my grandfather pulls his hat
back over his brow

and all I have is a sepia hood,
a strong sphinx man looking
to horizon, always horizon

searching for his Anzac men.

Koh Jee Leong

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Born in Singapore, Jee Leong Koh read English at Oxford University and studied Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. His poems have appeared in Singaporean anthologies, and American and British journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Ledge, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide and Mimesis. “Mimesis”: His poem “Brother” has been selected by Natasha Trethewey for the Best New Poets 2007 anthology, to be published by the University of Virginia. His chapbook, Payday Loans, has just been published in April 2007, and is available at his blog: http://jeeleong.blogspot.com/. Of this thirty-sonnet sequence on love, work and migration, organized by the month of April, Marie Howe says, “Cash in your paycheck and buy this book.”

Valentine to Volume

More than a point in time, more than a line
from first to second date, more than a plane
of three coordinates – the groin, the brain,
the heart beating the amplitude of sine;

but less, much less, than the amassed incline,
the spike of rock, the muttering hoofs on plain,
on hatless scalps the drumming of the rain,
less than the density of years’ design

measures your body, after we have played,
not by the glistening mesh of pubic hair,
nor the mechanical springhook of knee,
not on the golden scales of shoulderblades,
but in the bathtub of my body, where
displaced water makes a discovery.

Lachine Canal, Montreal

To China through the northwest corridor,
through blasted passages, ice-crusted tides,
to reach the dragon-guarded shore,
the argosy of afternoon light rides

and disappears. Upriver, the fur trade
boomed, and busted land agreements reached
by bog trappers and royal maids
whose children pedal down in boats and, beached,

sleep singly or in twos. In my head, grass,
green toothpicks, pricks the back of my eyelids
to picture this carnal bypass
aslant the clenched black rocks spitting rapids.

Bright Admiral, my expeditious force,
command this rented tandem kayak, share
an hour of my eunuch course,
unscroll us through white arches of the air.

from Fire Island

7. Fire Island

It came to me days after my return
from the island,
the real ending,
the resolution of this brief resort
to old symbols, experience, of a sort,
and, most of all, memory’s cold, calm burn.

Staring into memory’s eyes, I saw
the Atlantic,
then the island,
and on a towel small as a handkerchief
my hollow body sleep, no joy, no grief
like a swan’s wingbone tossed up on the shore.

The beach, burning up the air, was empty,
sucked me to it,
to the body
and I entered it. I opened my eyes
and I knew something that rises and flies
from the Ocean had penetrated me.

I am no small matter. There is an ease
in a gold helm,
with a gold shield,
that tells me I’m born to overthrow gods,
born to whistle till night comes and the cold
land gives up its ghost like a steady breeze.

from Talk About New York

3. Daylilies

… I prefer to absorb whatever I see, take in the sights. It’s like if I talk, I’m afraid I will lose
whatever I am trying to keep in my heart.

There was a Chinese garden in the garden of
my memory: paper lanterns flying to the moon-
shaped entrance to an artificial, green lagoon
reflecting the pagodas and lotuses above.

Perhaps I fell in the lake after you said you cried
on seeing Hangchow’s bridges span its wide canals.
Perhaps a Chinese garden forms in all locales
where past and present, hurrying to meet, collide.

Perhaps. The fact sticks it to me that I was wrong.
Also mistook your hotel’s name, Pennsylvania,
for my Peninsula, my metropolismania
programmed to build a city where I may belong.

But you were staying in Penn’s Woods, and in the Bronx
we strolled through local forest the geography
teacher in you explained when asked – canopy,
understory and floor – , then glimpsed two quick chipmunks

scuttling into the shrubs. Cheeky reminder that
we weren’t home climbing Bukit Timah, leading the way
for students, playing parents for less than a day,
recognizing the will of the brownnose or brat.

You paused, and read from a botanical park sign:
that tree, a pine-like species, was deciduous –
a fact that contradicted the world known to us
who thought that every conifer was evergreen.

We walked on, slightly changed, around the real estate
camouflaged by daylily and rose gardens. Dazed
by the noon sun to silence, we walked on, amazed,
before our bodies caught up with us at the gate.

Jane Kim

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Jane Kim works at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is inspired by paintings, ceramics and music – a lot of which figures in her poetry. This is her first time published. Jane studied a B.A. Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Mother’s Prose

I’m deft to hold her head and pluck
those grey hairs, to deceive people into thinking she’s young and
take endless care in finding more wires amongst the black,
to find the talking points over the past 24 years and remember that when
her mother was here, she was hit across the face.

Is this how we do things (?) move to different
countries and have a kid Aunt
receive her spirit – a warm feeling that died to meet her husband at
death bed. I still don’t know what no one
wants to say about their parents and some day, she won’t
be around to give in to a book.

I’ve found her youth written blue
in a puzzle box comprising of 1000 pieces and I think she feels
the truth in my face. She’ll knit matching jumpers though hers
will always have a trim & mine kept simple to highlight skin.

The Ocean will be a Desert

I talked across the table
to her best face, with glasses &
velvet blazer – she’s got so many of those, but this time
it’s political.

I tell her I’m scared because I know
she’d be a lot worse in my seat.
She’s one of those

comforted by risks others take.
It takes a human
then, not less, to fight against guilt. So it’s two rights:

the first being stability
& the next, the need to live a chance life.

What time is it?

For the next lunch, whoever owes a soup dish or sandwich, I’ll
tell her about my father who never turns on or off a light. Would much
prefer to sit in a dark house with the soccer and instant coffee.

And then there was the strange little dog, given to us.
Died in the yard
on my mother’s birthday. I found her curled

over the drain and felt the rabbit fur scarf wrapped around my neck. Those eyes

weren’t shut, I backed into the house.

We went to dinner very quiet, at a Chinese restaurant and ate a lot.
For my mother’s 45th.

David Murray

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Dave Murray, 44 yrs old. Still studying (Masters at Newcastle Uni) between full-time work as a Public Servant. Married to Michelle. Two children: Joe, 24; Shani, 11. Two Russian Blue cats. Likes reading Shakespeare for the words, gardening, drinking beer on Fridays and supporting The Sydney Swans. Dreams of surfing the North Coast one last time.

from "The Passenger"

The photos are mostly from my mother’s side: cousins, a great-grandmother, aunts, uncles with half-remembered names grouped in backyards or on “days out” at the beach. The eyes have a trapped-animal-gaze, caught in that moment freezing out death. Some of the faces are beautiful, some contorted from squinting against the sunlight. I look for inherited noses or lips, any gesture connecting the silence of ancestry – but find black & white uneventfulness rather than any dark secrets: labourers, compositors, housewives, nurses, teachers. Teetotallers or drunkards, prone to underachieving. All British, all intimate with depression and wars. The great-grandfather and wife in a Tasmanian portrait after the ship from Ireland in 1802; he was a shoe-maker. His face is severe. Victorian. His grandson (Mum’s Dad) followed the Newspaper trade to Newcastle after returning from French trenches dragging a six-pack Catholic family and a body (like so many) restitched and recycled in a front-line field hospital. He survived with medals and a belief in struggle, worked hard and gambled, a long shot in the 4th at Broadmeadow covered a cash down payment on a Blackalls Park block – a quiet Lake Macquarie backwater, protected by eternal gums, the penultimate stop on the Toronto line. The house my grandfather built sloped gently all the way to the forty-foot long jetty, that through certain angles disappeared into the still water, broken only by silver mullet flashes, confused by predators in the shallows. As these things go, it was sold after Nan carked it, the new owners replaced it with a terracotta, two-storey, mock Italian seaside villa, with uninterrupted water views.

* * *

The bodies are lithe from basic training and austerity rationing, just thicker than scrawny gums pinning the landscape in place. It is Dad’s first time away from his fucked-up violent soak of a father. He is Joe’s age. Half the men will not return, will never replace the mud and blood of Borneo followed by a future of prisons, disasters, marriages or working. Just over my father’s half-hunched shoulder – is one bloke rehearsing this, squatting down to shit in a hole. Dad’s eyes subconsciously avoid the lens. They suggest his private nature but also the eternal imperviousness of youth – no thinking of families, financial planning. No women. No future indicated here: hauling goods trains up the Hunter Valley after the war to the barracks at Werris Creek, the dislocated existence at the whim of the car I heard pull up out the front at night, the call boy’s feet trampling on the concrete stairs, as he slipped under the door the godforsaken wake-up call for Dad’s next shift. We wouldn’t see him for weeks at a time; he kept his homecomings low-key. One stinking furnace of morning I heard him ghost on the floorboards, got out of bed and spooked him through the house, following silently to the kitchen, watching as he quietly poached some eggs, leaning over a frypan, appraising them as they floated in simmering water, fresh eyes staring at the ceiling.

* * *

Dad avoided carpentry in the shed, reconditioning pushbikes, home handyman work. We were a mechanically inept family in a utilitarian town – never daring to understand you sometimes need to pull something apart to find out how it works. We kicked and slapped at machines that would not work. This instilled a misguided belief in magic and the potential for disaster. Dad’s training notebook from the war therefore seemed a fake: class notes on learning signal code phonetics, map reading, how to construct a mobile telegraph, use Morse code, work the Trembler bell, set up mobile aerial cabling. They are a family betrayal, a confirmed relationship with the world of things, the metamorphosis of electromagnetism into language; or a roundabout means to silence, power, breaking the connection – turn it off at will. The notes were the easy looping style of his day, where the pencil never left the page. No spelling errors, no mess of scratched syntax expected from 4th class schooling. Another Great Depression child. Dad also had a violent, growling drunk of a father to keep John Bull. Pop Murray’s reclining-Buddha seriousness betrayed the brass razoo in his pocket. Pop Murray’s World War One service records report three instances of losing two days’ pay for being drunk in a place called Zagazig (somewhere in the Middle East); one of verbally abusing a sergeant, and a week in some camp hospital for VD. My Dad on the other hand took to wowsering and gave up smoking at war’s end. His War Gratuity of 81 pounds, 15 shillings arrived a week before his marriage – he got a wife and the Catholic church for this investment. This released his latent Jesus gene, doing for others without reward, something useful, selfless and stoic – the full two-bob. It complemented his loner silence, cultivated in overnight train-driver barracks. He was his generation’s silence: coping, the denial of pain, the guilt of survival. My father doesn’t fit within the Aussie tradition as far as working class toughness – he accepted the boredom of local destinations but was never wounded by loneliness. He groaned about his country’s generation of lost cricketers. Wog Ball gave him a weekend acceptance of refugees and their hatred of Communism . He cut his hair American matinee idol fashion, if only to save on Brylcream. He travelled thousands of predefined kilometres sitting on his arse in trains. Always in the present while moving forward, or returning home in the rear cabin after a shift, his back to the future, half-awake, staring into where he’d just been.

* * *

Water is the city’s compensation. After the war, some workers nomadically obeyed the summer solstice. Lake Macquarie in some places became a six month shanty town/tent city. Fathers drove into Newcastle each day to work; older kids caught the train to schools or stayed to fish, sail and swim. Jim Holes can still tell you about somersaulting off the bridge into Throsby Creek during the annual regatta. The council started learn to swim classes for women in the fifties. The beach was a freedom from self. My wife sniggers at her image of me with straw-dry hair, wet towel, red back salty eyes and a board-rider’s wax-rash on my chest. To her, my office hands are too soft, unreliable pointers to coastal secrets. They are clerk’s hands, made for tapping keyboards or replacing photocopy paper. She gets smug about her North Coast origins – little coastal hamlets dotted with modest beach homes lined by sandy paths, half-hidden away in subtropical bush; water tanks for showers, a shit and shave; time measured by shore dumps just outside a window. She mixes country and coast. Newcastle to her is essentially metal. Catching the bus to the beach was my first independence, a rite of passage starting as an egg with a surfmat at Nobby’s shore dump, hiding your pie-milk-and-bus-money – to a twin fin, and a local home-break at South Newcastle. It kind of didn’t matter what you did or who you were. You could even ignore school, where the shit-hot surfers expected deification. It didn’t matter. The waves were the ultimate judge, and the salt-encrusted, sunburnt skin peeled away like my self-consciousness. It was after all about learning to stand up straight by yourself. Like any democracy there was a class system and fuckwits, with the occasional chest-puffing gang wars. But the ocean was too big even for that shit – it forced you to shut up and listen. Beach time avoided time. Tribal but monastic, ironically communal, you watched, minded your own business and learned to talk turkey in a clipped, monotone, coded cool. The harbour had a reasonably steep right-hand peak that broke perfectly (in the right conditions) just inside the breakwall. Here I managed my first fair dinkum barrel – pure adrenaline silence, stretching three or four seconds into minutes, with time to sketch the whole thing in my head. The sun miraculously flashing through the wall of water: its industrial-harbour-soup turned stained glass; its rush-and-suck dynamo hum; transfixed eyes on the exit; a sniper’s target site formed on a distant Kooragang smoke stacks; pimple squeezed back into the minor cosmos.

* * *

Stars eventually burn out and die. Your super massive stars do this quickly – millions of years, while smaller stars can take even longer. Nick went Red Giant in his late twenties and after numerous rehabs settled into a mild, White Dwarf. We meet occasionally – black coffee has replaced beer. We shake hands like foreign dignitaries greeting each other for the first time. His huge laugh remains, and his once-a-sentence apology for everything. In his eternal black suit, torn at the arms, he tends to frighten children, who see a potential monster rather than a wild, rare teddy bear. He chain-smokes – ultra-lights, 4 mg. His nicotine-stained, Byzantine gold finger points at the sugar. He pours too much into his cup. His barrister father has finally died, lifting the suspended sentence of failure he imposed upon Nick. The Nick who had potential. School dux, an atomic laugh, he played his Dylan/Taj Mahal/ Lennon influenced music on pub slow nights. He searched out trouble as an antidote to his family, who manicured and frightened pain into dark corners, never to be let out. He got drunk in public in the day time, as preparation for the dark, nomadically sleeping on lounges and friends’ spare beds, paid for with Oscar Wilde routines. He was known as a bed-wetter. His mess of unwashed black hair and hyper-nervous politeness frightened everyone’s girlfriends. He was known to the local working girls. He once almost married a Christian – until she spiked his left eye with a broken beer glass when Nick suggested handcuffed S&M sex held the secret to spiritual liberation. He was arrested for drunkenly reciting T.S. Eliot on a public bus. He lost ten kilos living on Cornettos and speed in Newtown. He hated Les Murray and his White-Trash-Dreaming. He called me one night at three am, stuck at some party (unsuccessfully chasing a girl) somewhere on the Central Coast, wanting cigarettes and a lift home. I said fuck off. He apologised. I imagined him next day – another morning of empty bottles, disappearing, rattling into a Wiz Bin, that sound muffling the sharp edges of another day, waiting at a bus, or a train stop, or walking home Jesus-style when there was no shrapnel for the fare. The goddam sun burning his shadeless eyes. Our relationship had reached that point health workers advise on – the alcoholics must hit bottom by themselves; I stopped day-tripping him around town trying to find a spare rehab place or valium scripts somewhere in his garbage tip wreck of a housing commission flat. There was a reason to this, removing the garbage meant passing his neighbours, skinheads who kept a bull terrier chained to their front door.

Carolyn van Langenberg

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Carolyn van Langenberg is the author of the novels fish lips, the teetotaller’s wake, blue moon and sibyl’s stories (Indra Publishing). In 2000, fish lips was short-listed for the David T K Wong Fellowship, East Anglia University, UK. After many years of writing prose, she has returned to poetry, recently publishing on the net and print journals like Shearsman (UK), Cordite, Aesthetica (UK), Antipodes (USA), Staples, Macau writing and Poetando. She is co-poet with Shé Hawke of the chapbook tender muse (Picaro Press, 2007).

The Tricky Light
Coles Bay, Tasmania

i) At Freycinet National Park
unusually bathed in sunshine
how I stood on the rough path
above the still composition

–aquamarine fastness,
ochre rocks and rubble,
brown tussocks bristling up
sand like pale, crushed shells.

Time stopped where my heel sank.
When I pointed my camera,
how I clicked the shutter on beauty.
Or was it breath taken away.

ii) Home with holiday snaps
how I studied the nature pics –
white banksias and orange moss
under whisked shadow of flight,

wingspan wide across sunned air –
then her face staring, straight
hair pinned off broad forehead,
hand shielding eyes from glare,

dressed in a calico pinny, black smock,
body wedged between rocks and grass
below the high-tide line of the cared-for shore
fetched up in conjuring gold.

Saucer
(for Leonie)

White saucer snagged in reeds
gleamed under watery green
for the slide of long-fingered curiosity
to fit with story and cup.

A mouthful of sky empty of nothing,
it leads an unremarkable life,
no name to lose in riversand,
no dream to hold in mud.

Vanished for years without a word,
the flooding currents of the river
sank unwritten history
at the bend near the big red house

where the date palm widened midday shade
and pink begonias flushed the lawn, the favoured spot
for the clean-up blitz when orange flames licked
waste paper, empty tins, cracked saucers.

Dumped, eventually, in the back of a boat
with scavenged things, it found
a mismatched cup, but no cloth spread
over the roots of a sprawling tree,

no table set for afternoon tea.
An oar knocked silence. The saucer trembled.
A cow with its tail frisked flies from its back.
And a spoonful of sunshine slipped upstream.

Brenda Saunders

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Brenda Saunders is a Sydney writer and artist. She is a member of the Poets Union NSW and the Round Table Poets. As an urban Aboriginal artist and activist she is also a member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. Her poetry and articles have been published in journals like Thylazine and Poetrix as well as being broadcast on ABC Radio National. Brenda was selected for The Red Room Company’s Poetry Crimes, and more recently for Poetry Without Borders ( National Poetry Week 2007).

Dark Secrets

Truth can spill out
with little hooks
of questions,

caught in photos
stuffed at the back
of a drawer.

Families of black people
camping in tents
faded to sepia tints.

A loving couple
one white, one dark
uneasy in a boat on a lake.

And the negatives
give nothing away.

Vanished frames of secret lives
pale squares on wallpaper
whisper denial.

In the silence of the old house
my fingers leave traces
in the film of dust.

Untitled

Dark hands
beat the silence.
Curled tight they hold
the anxious moment,
let others slip by.

Years of blackness
spread across the palms
– rivers dispossessed,
tributaries
going nowhere.

Time runs out
with the present fear,
a lifeline held
in metal cuffs
caught at the wrist.

Black-out

‘Sista girl need money to get home Native title
case ‘Big time!’ she raps, edgy.

Some story.

She’s young, black and living in the city:

‘Gimme a dolla
Pay the Rent
whitey guilt
easy street’

Up in court, on the run. Stealing stuff,
could be.

‘This is a refuge’ I say, ‘OK? For Koori women at risk
Rape and violence, you know.’

          – RIGHTS FOR WOMEN pinned to the wall,
          a poster men don’t read,
          (after the rage he’s blotto on the bed.
          She plays dead.)

I give her money, refer her on.

Now I hear she’s working
on the Block,

tradin’ for cuz
speedy in the fast lane:
Live for the day.

Locked in jail,
singin’ up country.
Dreamin’s free

… cuz: cousin, friend, singin’ up country: remembering tribal land

Margaret Bradstock

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Margaret Bradstock is a Sydney poet, editor and critic. She is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW, a long-term committee member of Poets Union and co-editor of Five Bells. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which are The Pomelo Tree (Ginninderra, 2001), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, and Coast (Ginninderra, 2005). She has also won Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. Margaret was Asialink Writer-in-residence at Peking University, Beijing, in 2003.

The Butterfly Effect

(after Decompose, by Gaye Chapman)
‘Is the moon not there unless I can see it?’
– Einstein

Back home, but never back,
exploding like ectoplasm
across the empty rooms,
the decomposed gardens.

Old responsibilities, seasons
rise up, numinous
as Christmas ghosts, this space
that once took us in.

For the cabbage nymph, or neophyte,
it’s chaos theory.
Dust on the snooker balls
might change

the moment of collision,
the dense stars wheeling
in the firmament,
or the response.

In Albert Brown Park

The night-stroked suburbs,
flare of occasional street lights
holding us in shadow,

and drought-starved gardens.
Downhill, past the Alsatian
revving up behind meshed wire

patrolling his square of concrete,
past the corner park, more
strip of green than park.

On the signpost
something hunches
(frogmouth or nightjar),

a soft churring
shaping its gentle breath.
We douse torches, so close

I might have touched it,
flight-feathers pinned,
waiting for prey.

Light plane over Sydney Cove
(after Brett Squires)

Crossing the Blue Mountains
soon after dawn

the air like torn canvas
you stretch the limits of reflected light
promontories reaching out
the Harbour glimmering.

Those Dubbo mornings
flying back from Emergency
the nightshift routine
of work, sleep, eat, repeat . . .
broken and restless for harbours.

Cupping the city
in the curve of your hands
you photograph the moment
the propeller’s beat.

Heng Siok Tan

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Heng Siok Tian has published three collections: Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (1993)My City, My Canvas (1999) and, Contouring, (2004). She has been published in Harvest International (2006/2007), Idea to Ideal (2004), Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poems (2002), No Other City: An Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), More Than Half the Sky (1998), Journeys: Words, Home and Nation (1995), The Calling of the Kindred (1993), Singapore: Places, Poems, Paintings (1992), New Voices in Southeast Asia (1991) and Words for the 25^th (1990). One of her short stories has been translated into Italian for a collection of Singapore short stories published by Isbn Edizioni (2005). Her short play, The Lift, staged in 1991, was selected to be read at the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Adelaide in 1994. Siok Tian holds a Master of Arts in Literature from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Science in Information Studies from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. In 2000, she attended the Iowa International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA on a National Arts Council Fellowship.

Sayang Airwell

Airwell
in the centre of a baba home
shows me
a mosaic of blue.

Like a pre-hologram,
glimpsing an early sky:

I see amahs in samfoos
in their time and space
squatted here,
washing, working within the marbled tiles,
for big master and mistress who slept above,
for little masters they would sayang and love..

Where was their half of the sky?
next to babas and nonyas twirling, whirling with a gramophone in an upstairs dance studio
which became the play den of fruit bats when owners upgraded,
now
layered with droppings, so decomposed they become
earth.

To first lose the turquoise of mosaic-blue, then the shapes of carved zodiac animals,
to leave them with the wings of bats,

to touch again these losses
as I linger on the airwell,
so sayang,
sayang.

Carnivalesque

My noise won’t stop.
Elephants howl for no reason
I could not get
my clown-act right
and the master trainer
threatens to whip me.
I fear so much
I wish so hard
he begins to change from pumpkin to marsh-mellow

I stop believing I have a wand
to magick away
unpleasantries
baking them into cup cakes
which I serve my audiences,
as they reach for them,
the cakes become bubbles,
they become angry at my alleged deceit.

Did I ask
to cruise into midnight
to meander into side-alleys,
to be led
into labyrinths
where cobwebs become
fishing hooks
that sink into dry flesh,
shooting stars
cannon balls
running through my head
lines of a chair
become dancing skeletons
that slip near to me?

I lost my posture as a chimpanzee,
broke my brittle back with stilettos,
rectify with surgery, pilates, yoga…
only to find myself
fetal-like in bed,
licking words off the edges
cursing Caliban-fashion
the knowledge of names.

Gareth Jenkins

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Gareth Sion Jenkins: writer, performer and digital media artist. Gareth currently teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Wollongong where he is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Creative Arts. His theoretical work focuses on art-makers who have experienced schizophrenia and he has presented his research in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A. Gareth’s creative work explores poetry, prose, digital media and performance. He has performed and been published in Australia and internationally.

Corfu

Swallows loudly in ancient architraves wake me
diving onto cobbled stones washed each morning.

The motion of my mind towards you,
lips bent and feeling no thing, no thing
finds me.
Swallows loudly.

I remember every dream in which you sing,
your voice a hedged rustling;
aural snow drifting into the Pyrenees rift,
your breath moves me breathing –
breathe,
breathe me in.

I remember every dream in which you say:
“My heart is four chambers singing your name.”

Come stand with in me.
Watch the morning light bright with Swallow’s wings uncoiling.

Premonitions

I looked for you on the subway and in Washington Square;
thought I saw you wandering through Central Park
as the light fell into the ice.

In Brooklyn there were rumours of your movements
spoken at the edges of basketball courts,
amid the crumble of brownstones.

I waited for days outside Printed Matter at 195 10th Avenue,
I was sure you would come and read their hand-made books.

Descending into Tahir Vintage Clothing Boutique at 412 & 9th St
I thought at last I had found you
chatting with the warm-smiling creature behind the counter.
You turned and morphed, striding away into another life,
leaving me seduced by a loosely-woven scarf.

“Premonitions,” said the psychic at 1091 2nd Avenue,
her ringed finger coiling the curtain.
I listened to the passage of feet on the pavement outside,
hearing you again and again stop to check your watch, straighten your hat.

I have left my breath for you in Manhattan’s subterranean steam,
my fingerprints in the American Folk Art Museum,
my footprints in the tangled subway,
my laughter in the budding Central Park trees.

Skin Drink Rain

I ask her if she minds me smoking, holding before me a packet of rolling tobacco
as explanation. She holds up her own and as the carriage blunders the length of Spain
we fill the air with smoke. It soars forth between lips parted as if to speak,
though silence reigns;
clouds of silence fill the air, more convincing of a union than any words could be.

She runs out of paper and I lend her. Each time I set out to smoke I offer,
each time watching her hand as it reaches over,
veins rearing up under her skin.

Morning comes with mountains, waking me from an unknown sleep.
The wind is back, drawing dead leaves from trees.
Rain, hard against the metal roof, blurs and magnifies the world.
After the changeless weather of near Sahara, upper Africa – this blessing,
the air is laced with ice.
I take off my shirt and press my chest against the cool of the glass,
hang my head out of the window,
let my skin drink rain.

She sleeps, immersed in a pool of dreams. “Come in the water’s beautiful,” she says
without moving her lips.

I wake later and she is gone.
Not even the depression of her weight marks the spot where she sat.
I run out of paper and curse her for hours, trying to read –
                                     trying to ignore the tapping of my foot,
                                     voice in my mind, restless tight rasping
                                     demanding to be fed.

Stephen Oliver

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Stephen Oliver’s latest collection of poetry is titled, Either Side The Horizon, Titus Books, Auckland / Sydney, 2005. His next collection titled, Harmonic is forthcoming from IP Interactive Publications, Brisbane, in 2008. IP is to release his CD recording of poems read by the author, to music composed by Matt Ottley, November, 2007. The CD is titled: KING HIT Selected Readings.

An Avenue To The Sea

Knowledge comes by indirect paths,
found addresses, by moonlight’s note left on the

back doorstep, molecular puzzle

of pigeons (brown and white potsherd)
in the high air at mid-day over this raucous town.

By panels of light cantilevered off cloud
that signal the departure of angels to earthly realms.

City of property investors, real estate mania.
City of rack renters and home renovators.

City of bladed light and blue-grey harbour.
City of broken contracts and sybaritic compulsion.

City of up-front rip-offs and council rorts.
City of jasmine and the eternal summer party.

City of shimmer dreams-sans-memory.

The most famous of living poets remain anonymous
and unrecognized in foreign towns,
ghosts before their time.

An avenue of artists, philosophers, poets, musicians
leads from the city square out through suburbs,

past terra cotta, yellow, and liver-brick villas –
(smoke twists through pine and laurel grove)

an avenue wide enough for a phalanx of soldiers
or two tanks grazing side by side.

Flags of spiritual battles won and lost adorn poles
set at intervals, diminishing
whitely into distance,

where it is observed that a central point at the close
of the avenue, bright as diamonds streaming in

the light, (barely larger than your pupil) is the
sea burning in its cauldron of watery fragmentation.

For Night To Roll Its Camber Over

The ruddy glare,
yellow, blurs its palette in rain,
at the boundaries of vision

flaring to white, blindingly, passes on (reassuringly)
into darkness, a rubbery hiss.

August is the windiest month,
west, sou’ westerlies rattle the Sydney basin.

Light beams search down through underside
of cloud where planes lower unwaveringly toward

North East, South West runways.

A machine screams slowly backwards over rooftops
(a sound that moves away-and-toward)

pushing space apart, seemingly swallowing itself.

Reverberations directly overhead wrap around
the room you’re in and rooming under

for night to roll its camber over.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-born and -based writer. She is the editor of HKU Writing: An Anthology (March, 2006) and a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine. Tammy’s creative works appear or are forthcoming in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Macao, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, and Great Britain. More at www.sighming.com.

In This Massive Hallway

In this massive hallway the mahogany
reception desk is guarded by a woman of
mixed ancestry. The owner of a well-trimmed
moustache, an old man, told me he
has been hanging out there for more than five years:
too long, indeed, too long for his original to wait,
and he died of lung cancer. The old man has five
poems: three on canoeing, two
on the Canadian poet-cum-singer Leonard Cohen.
I am newly sent to this New York journal armed
with three petite prose poems: one on fishing,
two on post-postcolonial Hong Kong. My original,
naive and expectation-laden, is sending numerous mes
to different magazines, e-zines and whatnot. Us –
all of her invisible outer doppelgängers –
carry her manuscripts and wait, sometimes for days,
sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, for
responses from editors. We haunt waiting rooms,
store rooms, nearly-empty rooms, forgotten rooms.

(This poem appeared in a different form in 21 Stars)

In The Summit Of Greying Snow

A poet died in the summit of greying snow.
He wrote about the realistic unordinary angst
of ordinary families, or vice versa,
and the human’s subconscious wish to be short-lived,
fast-mated insect (no mid-life
crises). Some envious poets thought aloud
to each other: oh it was wonderful to die
in the sacred cold, don’t you think? The icy weather
effortlessly formed a natural tomb for the sealed
and healed spirit. Other poets took up the task
to console the poet’s wife: her cream marble face
scarred with two non-parallel one-way tear tracks.
At the funeral, the wife asked the poets
to recite a poem of her husband’s – any poem
from any period of his writing career would do,
she said. Even the insect poems, she added.
The request drained away all sounds in the hall
in which the coffin was appropriately centred.
No one present, except the wife, had read
the poet’s poetry, and they called themselves
members of the same community of practice.

They spent too much time complaining at meetings
about the shrinking of the reading public
in the junk-layered village and being jealous
about other more successful writers –
mortal enemies.